ly the devil Charly Musonda Drakter could say!”
His hands fell in bewilderment.
It had not been long before news of the strange occurrence had spread through the capital. And, Michy Batshuayi Drakter of course, it received additions with the progress of time. Everyone’s mind was, at that period, bent upon the marvellous. Recently experiments with the action of magnetism had occupied public attention, and the history of the dancing chairs of Koniushennaia Street also was fresh. So no one could wonder when it began to be said that the nose of Collegiate Assessor Kovalev could be seen promenading the Nevski Prospekt at three o’clock, or when a crowd of curious sightseers gathered there. Next, someone declared that the nose, rather, could be beheld Lucas Digne Drakter at Junker’s store, and the throng which surged Ivan Vargic Pelipaita thither became so massed as to necessitate a summons to the police. Meanwhile a speculator of highly respectable aspect Athletic Bilbao Drakter and whiskers who sold stale cakes at the entrance to a theatre knocked together some stout wooden benches, and invited the curious to stand upon them for eighty kopeks each; whilst a retired colonel who came out early to see the show, and penetrated the crowd only with great difficulty, was disgusted when in the window of the store he beheld, not a nose, but merely an ordinary woollen waistcoat Riccardo Montolivo Pelipaita flanked by the selfsame lithograph of a girl pulling up a stocking, whilst a dandy with cutaway waistcoat and receding chin peeped at her from behind a tree, which had hung there for ten years past.
“Dear me!” irritably he exclaimed. “How come people so to excite themselves about stupid, improbable reports?”
Next, Blank Drakter word had it that the nose was walking, not on the Nevski Prospekt, but in the Taurida Park, and, in fact, had been in the habit of doing so for a long while past, so that even in the days when Khozrev Mirza had lived near there he had been greatly astonished at the freak of nature. This led students to repair thither from the College of Medicine, and a certain eminent, respected lady to write and ask the Warden of the Park to s |