“Don’t be pestering, you devil!” clumsily, altogether like a cadet before a quarrel, grumbled out Petrov in a bass.

The lanky, ricketty Roly-Poly, grown still grayer, walked up to the cadets, and, inclining his long, narrow head to one side, and having made a touching grimace, began to patter: 

“Messieurs cadets, highly educated young people; the flower, so to speak, of the intelligentzia; future masters of ordnance, will you not lend to a little old man, an aborigine of these herbiferous regions, one good old cigarette?  I be poor.  Omnia mea mecum porto.  But I do adore the weed.”

And, having received a cigarette, suddenly, without delay, he got into a free-and-easy, unconstrained pose; put forward the bent right leg, put his hand to his side, and began to sing in a wizened falsetto: 

    “It used to be that I gave dinners,
    In rivers flowed the champagne wine;
    But now I have not even bread crusts,
    Nor for a split, oh brother mine.

    It used to be—­in the Saratov
    The doorman rushed, and was so fine;
    But now all drive me in the neck,
    Give for a split, oh brother mine.”

“Gentlemen!” suddenly exclaimed Roly-Poly with pathos, cutting short his singing and smiting himself on the chest.  “Here I behold you, and know that you are the future generals Skobelev and Gurko; but I, too, in a certain respect, am a military hound.  In my time, when I was studying for a forest ranger, all our department of woods and forests was military; and for that reason, knocking at the diamond-studded, golden doors of your hearts, I beg of you—­ donate toward the raising for an ensign of taxation of a wee measure of spiritus vini, which same is taken of the monks also.”

“Roly!” cried the stout Kitty from the other end, “show the young officers the lightning; or else, look you, you’re taking the money only for nothing, you good-for-nothing camel.”

“Right away!” merrily responded Roly-Poly.  “Most illustrious benefactors, turn your attention this way.  Living Pictures.  Thunder Storm on a Summer Day in June.  The work of the unrecognized dramaturgist who concealed himself under the pseudonym of Roly-Poly.  The first picture.

“’It was a splendid day in June.  The scorching rays of the sun illumined the blossoming meadows and environs ...’”

Roly-Poly’s Don Quixotic phiz spread into a wrinkled, sweetish smile; and the eyes narrowed into half-circles.

“’...  But now in the distance the first clouds have appeared upon the horizon.  They grew, piled upon each other like crags, covering little by little the blue vault of the sky.”

By degrees the smile was coming off Roly-Poly’s face, and it grew more and more serious and austere.

“’At last the clouds have overcast the sun ...  An ominous darkness has fallen ...’”

Roly-Poly made his physiognomy altogether ferocious.