“Your health, Gounsovski.  But you have no worry about that.”

“Why?” demanded Thaddeus Tchitcbnikoff in equivocal fashion.

“Because he is too useful to the government,” cried Ivan Petrovitch.

“No,” replied Annouchka; “to the revolutionaries.”

All broke out laughing.  Gounsovski recovered his slipping glasses by his usual quick movement and sniggered softly, insinuatingly, like fat boiling in the pot: 

“So they say.  And it is my strength.”

“His system is excellent,” said the prince.  “As he is in with everybody, everybody is in with the police, without knowing it.”

“They say ... ah, ah ... they say ...” (Athanase was choking over a little piece of toast that he had soaked in his soup) “they say that he has driven away all the hooligans and even all the beggars of the church of Kasan.”

Thereupon they commenced to tell stories of the hooligans, street-thieves who since the recent political troubles had infested St. Petersburg and whom nobody, could get rid of without paying for it.

Athanase Georgevitch said: 

“There are hooligans that ought to have existed even if they never have.  One of them stopped a young girl before Varsovie station.  The girl, frightened, immediately held out her purse to him, with two roubles and fifty kopecks in it.  The hooligan took it all.  ‘Goodness,’ cried she, ‘I have nothing now to take my train with.’  ‘How much is it?’ asked the hooligan.  ‘Sixty kopecks.’  ’Sixty kopecks!  Why didn’t you say so?’ And the bandit, hanging onto the two roules, returned the fifty-kopeck piece to the trembling child and added a ten-kopeck piece out of his own pocket.”

“Something quite as funny happened to me two winters ago, at Moscow,” said la belle Onoto.  “I had just stepped out of the door when I was stopped by a hooligan.  ‘Give me twenty kopecks,’ said the hooligan.  I was so frightened that I couldn’t get my purse open.  ‘Quicker,’ said he.  Finally I gave him twenty kopecks.  ‘Now,’ said he then, ‘kiss my hand.’  And I had to kiss it, because he held his knife in the other.”

“Oh, they are quick with their knives,” said Thaddeus.  “As I was leaving Gastinidvor once I was stopped by a hooligan who stuck a huge carving-knife under my nose.  ’You can have it for a rouble and a half,’ he said.  You can believe that I bought it without any haggling.  And it was a very good bargain.  It was worth at least three roubles.  Your health, belle Onoto.”

“I always take my revolver when I go out,” said Athanase.  “It is more prudent.  I say this before the police.  But I would rather be arrested by the police than stabbed by the hooligans.”

“There’s no place any more to buy revolvers,” dedared Ivan Petrovitch.  “All such places are closed.”

Gounsovski settled his glasses, rubbed his fat hands and said: