“You are lying!”

“Lie yourself!”

“Lads, if he has seen one, let him tell us all directly what general he knows. Come, speak away⁠—for I know all the generals.”

“I’ve seen General Ziebert,” Kvasov answered with strange hesitation.

“Ziebert? There isn’t such a general. He looked at your back, I suppose, your Ziebert, when he was a lieutenant-colonel maybe, and you fancied in your fright he was a general!”

“No, listen to me!” cried Skuratov, “for I am a married man. There really was such a general at Moscow, Ziebert, of German family, though he was a Russian. He used to confess to a Russian priest every year, at the fast of the Assumption, and he was always drinking water, lads, like a duck. Every day he’d drink forty glasses of Moscow river water. They said that he took it for some disease, his valet told me so himself.”