He had scarcely entered, when crowds of Jews and Jewesses rushed round him, eager to look into his cart and fumble among the straw it was strewn with,—even under the seat—to find anything he might have to sell. “Off, ye scurvy louts!” he growled, turning into the market-place, where, in the shadow of a few ancient decayed chestnut-trees slowly dying in the centre of the square, hard on a score of wagons were drawn up, their horses unharnessed. He drove his own cart in there among them, brushed off the straw from his coat, and went straight to Mordko the barber’s, to get a shave. Presently he issued thence, clean-shaven, and with only one cut on his chin, plastered with a bit of paper, through which the blood oozed. The court was not yet open; but in front of the building that stood right in the market-place, opposite a very large church, a good many people had already assembled, and were sitting upon the time-worn steps, or lounging outside the windows. Women squatted along the white walls, chatting together, with the red aprons they had worn on their heads as they came, now fallen on to their shoulders. Boryna perceived Eva holding her boy by the hand, and surrounded by her witnesses. A storm of anger surged within him. He spat contemptuously, and withdrew into the corridor that ran the whole length of the officials’ private lodgings. The judgment hall was to the left; the secretary occupied the right side. Just then the manservant Yacek had passed the threshold of the lodgings with a samovar, and was blowing it so hard that it smoked like a factory chimney. From time to time a shrill angry voice was raised from the extremity of the smoke-darkened corridor. “Yacek! the young ladies’ shoes!” “Presently, presently.” The samovar was now hissing, and spouting flames, and burning like a volcano. “Yacek! water for master to wash!” “Yes, yes, directly, directly!” Perspiring, distracted, the man ran to and fro about the corridor till it rang again, and returned to blow, and went off anew; for his mistress now screamed: “Yacek, you rascal, where are my stockings?” “Confound this devil of a samovar!” The scene continued for some time yet; but at last the door of the court opened, and in the people rushed, filling the large whitewashed hall. Yacek was there again, now in his capacity as usher: barefooted, but in a dark-blue jacket and trousers of the same hue, and brass buttons. His red face perspiring freely, he wiped it with his sleeve as he slipped in behind the black grating by which the hall was divided into two parts. Tossing his head like a horse attacked by a gadfly (for his sandy hair fell over his eyes and into them), he sat down for a moment’s rest near a huge stove of green delf tiles, after peering cautiously into the adjoining room. So many people had come in that the place was chock-full. They pressed against the grating till it shook, and after a time began to talk, the murmur of voices soon filling the whole room.