Many voices were speaking at once, but Theodore Resoún, a carpenter, shouted loudest. There were two grown-up young men in his family, and he was attacking the Doútlofs. Old Doútlof was defending himself: he had stepped forward out of the crowd behind which he had at first stood. Now spreading out his arms, now clutching at his little beard, he sputtered and snuffled in such a manner that it would have been hard for himself to understand what he was saying. His sons and nephews⁠—splendid fellows, all of them⁠—stood pressing behind him, and the old man resembled the mother-hen in the game of hawk-and-chickens. The hawk was Resoún; and not only Resoún, but all the men who had two grown lads in their family, were attacking Doútlof. The point was, that Doútlof’s brother had been recruited thirty years before, and that Doútlof wished to be excused therefore from taking his turn with the families in which there were three grown-up young men, and wanted his brother’s service in the army to be counted to the advantage of his family, so that it should be given the same chance as those in which there were only two young men; and that these should all draw lots equally, and the third recruit be chosen from among all of them.