"Mitskhales sakles mingrule."[1]
The gentleman pounced upon him:
"No," he said, "be quiet. If you are a Georgian you must become a Russian, and you must not love the hut of a Mingrelian, but what you are ordered to love. You must like prison, even without orders——"
The Georgian left the gentleman in a horizontal position and went and drank Kachetin wine. The gentleman lay on the ground and pondered:
"Well, well, there are also Tartars, Armenians, Bashkirs, Kirghises, Mordva, Lithuanians. O Lord, what a number! And these are not all. There are our own people, the Slavs."
At this juncture a Little Russian came along, and of course he was singing in a very disloyal manner:
"Our ancestors once led
A happy life in Ukraina...."
"No," said the gentleman, rising to his feet. "Will you be kind enough in future to use the letter 'y' instead of 'oo'[2]; otherwise you undermine the unity of the empire."
He argued the point at some length, and the Little Russian listened, for, as proved most conclusively by all the collections of Little Russian anecdotes, the Little Russians are a very slow people, and like to do their work without hurrying. Unfortunately this gentleman was somewhat insistent.
Some kind people picked the gentleman up and asked him: