understand, and I can’t do it.”

Konstantin Levin spoke as though the floodgates of his speech had burst open. Sergey Ivanovitch smiled.

“But tomorrow it’ll be your turn to be tried; would it have suited your tastes better to be tried in the old criminal tribunal?”

“I’m not going to be tried. I shan’t murder anybody, and I’ve no need of it. Well, I tell you what,” he went on, flying off again to a subject quite beside the point, “our district self-government and all the rest of it — it’s just like the birch branches we stick in the ground on Trinity Day, for instance, to look like a copse which has grown up of itself in Europe, and I can’t gush over these birch branches and believe in them.”