one is gay of a spring morning, discipline should not be forgotten.  I invited the officers to drink in a private room, and sent the subalterns into the main hall of the restaurant.  Then the soldiers were thirsty, too, and I had drinks served to them out in the courtyard.  Then, my word, there was a perplexing business, for now the horses whinnied.  The brave horses, Feodor Feodorovitch, who also wished to drink the health of the Emperor.  I was bothered about the discipline.  Hall, court, all were full.  And I could not put the horses in private rooms.  Well, I made them carry out champagne in pails and then came the perplexing business I had tried so hard to avoid, a grand mixture of boots and horse-shoes that was certainly the liveliest thing I have ever seen in my life.  But the horses were the most joyous, and danced as if a torch was held under their nostrils, and all of them, my word! were ready to throw their riders because the men were not of the same mind with them as to the route to follow!  From our window we laughed fit to kill at such a mixture of sprawling boots and dancing hoofs.  But the troopers finally got all their horses to barracks, with patience, for the Emperor’s cavalry are the best riders in the world, Feodor Feodorovitch.  And we certainly had a great laugh! — Your health, Matrena Petrovna.”

[The “Barque” is a restaurant on a boat, among the isles, near the Gulf of Finland, on a bank of the Neva.]

These last graceful words were addressed to Madame Trebassof, who shrugged her shoulders at the undesired gallantry of the gay Councilor.  She did not join in the conversation, excepting to calm the general, who wished to send the whole regiment to the guard-house, men and horses.  And while the roisterers laughed over the adventure she said to her husband in the advisory voice of the helpful wife: 

“Feodor, you must not attach importance to what that old fool Ivan tells you.  He is the most imaginative man in the capital when he has had champagne.”

“Ivan, you certainly have not had horses served with champagne in pails,” the old boaster, Athanase Georgevitch, protested jealously.  He was an advocate, well-known for his table-feats, who claimed the hardest drinking reputation of any man in the capital, and he regretted not to have invented that tale.

“On my word!  And the best brands!  I had won four thousand roubles.  I left the little fete with fifteen kopecks.”

Matrena Petrovna was listening to Ermolai, the faithful country servant who wore always, even here in the city, his habit of fresh nankeen, his black leather belt, his large blue pantaloons and his boots glistening like ice, his country costume in his master’s city home.  Madame Matrena rose, after lightly stroking the hair of her step-daughter Natacha, whose eyes followed her to the door, indifferent apparently to the tender manifestations of her father’s orderly, the soldier-poet, Boris Mourazoff, who had written beautiful verses on the death of the Moscow students, after having shot them, in the way of duty, on their barricades.