“True enough, I hardly managed to wake you,” said Antonov, as he pulled on his boot. “I had to push and push, just as if you’d been a log!”

“Fancy now,” said Velenchuk, “if I’d been drunk now!⁠ ⁠…”

“That’s just like a woman we had at home,” began Chikin; “she hardly got off the stove for two years. Once they began waking her⁠—they thought she was asleep⁠—and she was already dead. She used to be taken sleepy that way. That’s what it is, old fellow!”

“Now then, Chikin, won’t you tell us how you set the tone during your leave of absence?” said Maksimov, looking at me with a smile as if to say: “Would you, too, like to hear the stupid fellow?”

“What tone, Theodor Maksimov?” said Chikin, giving me a rapid side-glance. “In course I told them what sort of a Caw-cusses we’d got here.”