It is shoulder of mutton, and very different stuff from the mutton which they cook in noble kitchens--mutton which has been kicking about the market-place four days or more.

All that sort of cookery has been invented by French and German doctors, and I should like to hang them for having done so.

They go and prescribe diets and a hunger cure as though what suits their flaccid German systems will agree with a Russian stomach! Such devices are no good at all." Sobakevitch shook his head wrathfully.

"Fellows like those are for ever talking of civilisation.

As if THAT sort of thing was civilisation! Phew!" (Perhaps the speaker's concluding exclamation would have been even stronger had he not been seated at table.) "For myself, I will have none of it.