present!"

And abruptly embracing me and kissing me with a smack on my shoulder,
Mísha darted out into the court to his calash, waving his cap over his
head, and uttering a yell; the monstrous coachman[8] bestowed upon him
an oblique glance across his beard, the trotters dashed forward, and all
disappeared!

On the following day, sinful man that I am, I did go to Sokólniki, and
actually did see the tent with the pennant and the inscription. The
tent-flaps were raised; an uproar, crashing, squealing, proceeded
thence. A crowd of people thronged around it. On the ground, on an
outspread rug, sat the Gipsy men and Gipsy women, singing, and thumping
tambourines; and in the middle of them, with a guitar in his hands, clad
in a red-silk shirt and full trousers of velvet, Mísha was gyrating like
a whirligig.--"Gentlemen! Respected sirs! Pray enter! The performance is
about to begin! Free!"--he was shouting in a cracked voice.--"Hey there!
Champagne! Bang! In the forehead! On the ceiling! Akh, thou rascal, Paul
de Kock!"--Luckily, he did not catch sight of me, and I hastily beat a
retreat.

I shall not dilate, gentlemen, on my amazement at the sight of such a
change. And, as a matter of fact, how could that peaceable, modest lad
suddenly turn into a tipsy good-for-nothing? Was it possible that all
this had been concealed within him since his childhood, and had
immediately come to the surface as soon as the weight of parental
authority had been removed from him?--And that he had kicked up a dust
in Moscow, as he had expressed it, there could be no possible doubt,
either. I had seen rakes in my day; but here something frantic, some
frenzy of self-extermination, some sort of recklessness, had made itself