If you'd been a bare half-minute sooner you'd have found him at home, maybe."

Still holding the handkerchief to his face, Kovalev returned to the cab, and cried wildly:

"Drive on!"

"Where to, though?" the cabman inquired.

"Oh, straight ahead!"

"'Straight ahead'? But the street divides here. To right, or to left?"

The question caused Kovalov to pause and recollect himself. In his situation he ought to make his next step an application to the Board of Discipline—not because the Board was directly connected with the police, but because its dispositions would be executed more speedily than in other departments. To seek satisfaction of the the actual department in which the Nose had declared itself to be serving would be sheerly unwise, since from the Nose's very replies it was clear that it was the sort of individual who held nothing sacred, and, in that event, might lie as unconscionably as it had lied in asserting itself never to have figured in its proprietor's company. Kovalev, therefore, decided to seek the Board of Discipline. But just as he was on the point of being driven thither there occurred to him the thought that the impostor and knave who had behaved so shamelessly during the late encounter might even now be using the time to get out of the city, and that in that case all further pursuit of the rogue would become vain, or at all events last for, God preserve us! a full month. So at last, left only to the guidance of Providence, the Major resolved to make for a newspaper office, and publish a circumstantial description of the Nose in such good time that anyone meeting with the truant might at once be able either to restore it to him or to give information as to its whereabouts. So he not only directed the cabman to the newspaper office, but, all the way thither, prodded him in the back, and shouted: "Hurry up, you rascal! Hurry up, you rogue!" whilst the cabman intermittently responded: "Aye, barin," and nodded, and plucked at the reins of a steed as shaggy as a spaniel.

The moment that the drozhki halted Kovalev dashed, breathless, into a small reception-office. There, seated at a table, a grey-headed clerk in ancient jacket and pair of spectacles was, with pen tucked between lips, counting sums received in copper.

"Who here takes the advertisements?" Kovalev exclaimed as he entered. "A-ah! Good day to you."

"And my respects," the grey-headed clerk replied, raising his eyes for an instant, and then lowering them again to the spread out copper heaps.

"I want you to publish——"

"Pardon—one moment." And the clerk with one hand committed to paper a figure, and with a finger of the other hand shifted two accounts markers. Standing beside him with an advertisement in his hands, a footman in a laced coat, and sufficiently smart to seem to be in service in an aristocratic mansion, now thought well to display some knowingness.

"Sir," he said to the clerk, "I do assure you that the puppy is not worth eight grivni even. At all events _I_ wouldn't give that much for it. Yet the countess loves it—yes, just loves it, by God! Anyone wanting it of her will have to pay a hundred rubles. Well, to tell the truth between you and me, people's tastes differ. Of course, if one's a sportsman one keeps a setter or a spaniel. And in that case don't you spare five hundred rubles, or even give a thousand, if the dog is a good one."

The worthy clerk listened with gravity, yet none the less accomplished a calculation of the number of letters in the advertisement brought. On either side there was a group of charwomen, shop assistants, doorkeepers, and the like. All had similar advertisements in their hands, with one of the documents to notify that a coachman of good character was about to be disengaged, and another one to advertise a koliaska imported from Paris in 1814, and only slightly used since, and another one a maid-servant of nineteen experienced in laundry work, but prepared also for other jobs, and another one a sound drozhki save that a spring was lacking, and another one a grey-dappled, spirited horse of the age of seventeen, and another one some turnip and radish seed just received from London, and another one a country house with every amenity, stabling for two horses, and sufficient space for the laying out of a fine birch or spruce plantation, and another one some second-hand footwear, with, added, an invitation to attend the daily auction sale from eight o'clock to three. The room where the company thus stood gathered together was small, and its atmosphere confined; but this closeness, of course, Collegiate Assessor Kovalev never perceived, for, in addition to his face being muffled in a handkerchief, his nose was gone, and God only knew its present habitat!

"My dear sir," at last he said impatiently, "allow me to ask you something: it is a pressing matter."

"One moment, one moment! Two rubles, forty-three kopeks. Yes, presently. Sixty rubles, four kopeks."

With which the clerk threw the two advertisements concerned towards the group of charwomen and the rest, and turned to Kovalev.

"Well?" he said. "What do you want?"

"Your pardon," replied Kovalev, "but fraud and knavery has been done. I still cannot understand the affair, but wish to announce that anyone returning me the rascal shall receive an adequate reward."

"Your name, if you would be so good?"

"No, no. What can my name matter? I cannot tell it you. I know many acquaintances such as Madame Chektareva (wife of the State Councillor) and Pelagea Grigorievna Podtochina (wife of the Staff-Officer), and, the Lord preserve us, they would learn of the affair at once. So say just `a Collegiate Assessor,' or, better, `a gentleman ranking as Major.'"

"Has a household serf of yours absconded, then?"

"A household serf of mine? As though even a household serf would perpetrate such a crime as the present one! No, indeed! It is my nose that has absconded from me."

"Gospodin Nossov, Gospoding Nossov? Indeed a strange name, that![*] Then has this Gospodin Nossov robbed you of some money?"

[* Nose is _noss_ in Russian, and Gospodin equivalent to the English "Mr."]

"I said nose, not Nossov. You are making a mistake. There has disappeared, goodness knows whither, my nose, my own actual nose. Presumably it is trying to make a fool of me."

"But how could it so disappear? The matter has something about it which I do not fully understand."

"I cannot tell you the exact how. The point is that now the nose is driving about the city, and giving itself out for a State Councillor —wherefore I beg you to announce that anyone apprehending any such nose ought at once, in the shortest possible space of time, to return it to myself. Surely you can judge what it is for me meanwhile to be lacking such a conspicuous portion of my frame? For a nose is not like a toe which one can keep inside a boot, and hide the absence of if it is not there.