The first one behaved in a violent and somewhat mysterious manner.

He saluted the major by throwing a chair at him.

Then he seized the editor by the hair, bumped his head against the table three or four times and kicked him.

When this exhilarating exercise was over, the visitor shook his fist very close to the major's nose and said, "You idiot and outcast, if you don't put that notice in to-morrow, I'll come round here and murder you! Do you hear me ?" Then he cuffed the major's ears a couple of times, kicked him some more, emptied the ink-stand over his head, poured the sand from the sand-box in the same place, knocked over the table and went out.

During all this time the major sat still with a sickly kind of a smile upon his face and never uttered a word.