"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.

" Sergey Ivanovitch merely shrugged his shoulders, as though to express his wonder how the birch branches had come into their argument at that point, though he did really understand at once what his brother meant.

"Excuse me, but you know one really can't argue in that way," he observed.