The grey was of a dignified disposition. It had spent three years in the army service corps and had only been transferred to the civil authorities because of a sudden blindness of the left eye which even the veterinary surgeon had been unable to account for. All in all, it was a stately grey, harnessed to a nimble golden-yellow gig. In it, on many a day, beside Inspector Eibenschütz, sat the sergeant of gendarmerie, Wenzel Slama. On his sand-coloured helmet glittered the golden spike and the imperial double eagle. Between his knees projected his rifle with fixed bayonet atop. The Inspector held reins and whip in his hand. His fair, soft moustache, assiduously waxed in an upward curve, gleamed with the same golden hue as the double eagle and the spiked helmet. It seemed to be made from the same material. From time to time the whip cracked gaily, as if it were actually laughing. The grey galloped along with haughty elegance and with the dash of an active cavalry horse. And on hot summer days, when the streets and roads of the Zlotogrod District were quite dry and almost thirsty, there arose an enormous golden-grey swirl of dust which enveloped the grey, the gig, the sergeant and the Inspector. In winter, however, Anselm Eibenschütz had at his disposal a small two-seater sleigh. The grey galloped with the same elegance in winter as in summer. It was no longer a golden-grey swirl of dust but a silver flurry of snow that shrouded the sergeant, the Inspector and the sleigh in invisibility, and the grey most of all for he was almost as white as the snow.

Anselm Eibenschütz, our Inspector of Weights and Measures, was a very imposing man. He was an old soldier. He had spent his twelve years as a long-serving non-commissioned officer in the Eleventh Artillery Regiment. He had, one might say, risen from the ranks. He had been an honest soldier. And he would never have abandoned the military if his wife, in her rigorous, even inflexible, manner, had not compelled him to do so.

He had married, as almost all long-serving non-commissioned officers are in the habit of doing. Ah, they are lonely, the long-serving non-commissioned officers! They see only men, nothing but men! The women they encounter flutter past them like swallows. They marry, the non-commissioned officers, to keep hold of at least one single swallow, as it were.