For a while the sounds were not wholly unpleasing, but suddenly something seemed to go wrong, for a mazurka started, to be followed by "Marlborough has gone to the war," and to this, again, there succeeded an antiquated waltz.

Also, long after Nozdrev had ceased to turn the handle, one particularly shrill-pitched pipe which had, throughout, refused to harmonise with the rest kept up a protracted whistling on its own account.

Then followed an exhibition of tobacco pipes--pipes of clay, of wood, of meerschaum, pipes smoked and non-smoked; pipes wrapped in chamois leather and not so wrapped; an amber-mounted hookah (a stake won at cards) and a tobacco pouch (worked, it was alleged, by some countess who had fallen in love with Nozdrev at a posthouse, and whose handiwork Nozdrev averred to constitute the "sublimity of superfluity"-- a term which, in the Nozdrevian vocabulary, purported to signify the acme of perfection).
Finally, after some hors-d'oeuvres of sturgeon's back, they sat down to table--the time being then nearly five o'clock.

But the meal did not constitute by any means the best of which Chichikov had ever partaken, seeing that some of the dishes were overcooked, and others were scarcely cooked at all.

Evidently their compounder had trusted chiefly to inspiration--she had laid hold of the first thing which had happened to come to hand.