these pitchers and filled with the hot liquor a small porcelain cup like a Japanese sáki-cup that had been placed beside every guest's plate.
I had heard a short time before this an anecdote of an ignorant East-Siberian peasant, who in making an excavation for some purpose found what he supposed to be the almost perfectly preserved remains of a mammoth. With the hope of obtaining a reward he determined to report this extraordinary find to the isprávnik, and in order to make his story more impressive he tasted some of the flesh of the extinct beast so that he could say to the police officer that the animal was in such a state of preservation as to be actually eatable. An investigation was ordered, a scientist from the Irkútsk Geographical Society was sent to the spot, and the remains of the mammoth were found to be a large deposit of the peculiar Siberian mineral known as górni kózha, or "mineral leather."[1] The irritated isprávnik, who felt that he had been made to appear like an ignorant fool in the eyes of the Irkútsk scientists, sent for the peasant and said to him angrily, "You stupid blockhead! Did n't you tell me that you had actually eaten some of this stuff? It is n't a mammoth at all; it 's a mineral — a thing that they take out of mines."
"I did eat it, Bárin," maintained the peasant stoutly; " but," he added, with a sheepish, self-excusatory air, "what can't you eat with butter?"
As the servant in Maimáchin brought round and handed to us successively black mushrooms, crawfish tails, tree-lichens, and seaweed, I thought of the peasant's mammoth, and said to myself, "What can't one eat with vinegar and Chinese brandy?"
After the last of the cold victuals had been served and disposed of, the dishes were cleared away, the saucers were
- ↑ One of the asbestic forms of hornblende. It contains iron, aluminium, calcium, magnesium, manganese, sodium, and potassium combined with silicon.
