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"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.

But Konstantin Levin wanted to justify himself for the failing,

of which he was conscious, of lack of zeal for the public

welfare, and he went on.