LEBEDYAN
'Ah! tell him to wait a minute and take him some vodka.'
'Yes, sir.'
Baklaga, as I was told afterwards, was the name of a youthful, handsome, and excessively depraved groom; the prince loved him, made him presents of horses, went out hunting with him, spent whole nights with him. . . . Now you would not know this same prince, who was once a rake and a scapegrace. . . . In what good odour he is now; how straight-laced, how supercilious! How devoted to the government—and, above all, so prudent and judicious!
However, the tobacco smoke had begun to make my eyes smart. After hearing Hlopakov's exclamation and the prince's chuckle one last time more, I went off to my room, where, on a narrow, hair-stuffed sofa pressed into hollows, with a high, curved back, my man had already made me up a bed.
The next day I went out to look at the horses in the stables, and began with the famous horse-dealer Sitnikov's. I went through a gate into a yard strewn with sand. Before a wide open stable-door stood the horsedealer himself—a tall, stout man no longer young, in a hareskin coat, with a raised turnover collar. Catching sight of me, he moved slowly to meet me, held his cap in both hands above his head, and in a sing-song voice brought out:
'Ah, our respects to you. You'd like to have a look at the horses, may be?'
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