"Well, sir?" asked Bruno, who was a prey to curiosity
mingled with a kind of agonized feeling. "What is the
value of the Russian pound weight?"
About sixteen and a half Dutch 'ponds,'" replied Van Mitten, after a little mental arithmetic.' "And that amounts to-?"
"That makes exactly seventy-five and a half ponds, or one hundred and fifty-one pounds."
Bruno uttered a cry of despair and suddenly leaped from the scale, the other platform of which fell heavily to the ground, and he fell upon a bench half fainting.
"One hundred and fifty-one pounds!" he repeated, as if he had lost a considerable slice of his existence.
In fact, at his departure from home, Bruno had weighed eighty-four ponds, or one hundred and sixty-eight pounds.
Now he weighed only seventy-five and a half ponds, or one hundred and fifty-one pounds. He had then lost seven- teen pounds in twenty-six days of comparatively easy travelling without any great privations or fatigue. And now that the evil had begun, where was it to stop? What would become of the stoutness which Bruno was hoping to possess, which had taken him twenty years to gain, thanks to his observance of a well-calculated treatment? How would be now fall away from the honourable condition in which he had formerly maintained himself, particularly at the present juncture, when, for want of a carriage travelling
1 M. Van Mitten must be wrong. He meant about 18 "ponds," we presume; 16 × 4 gives only 66 ponds, not 75.-TRANSLATOR.
