even into the street with him. And when at last I go back into my study my face still goes on smiling, I suppose from inertia.

A little later another ring at the bell. Somebody comes into the hall, and is a long time coughing and taking off his things. Yegor announces a student. I tell him to ask him in. A minute later a young man of agreeable appearance comes in. For the last year he and I have been on strained relations; he answers me disgracefully at the examinations, and I mark him one. Every year I have some seven such hopefuls whom, to express it in the students’ slang, I ‘chivy’ or ‘floor’. Those of them who fail in their examination through incapacity or illness usually bear their cross patiently and do not haggle with me; those who come to the house and haggle with me are always youths of sanguine temperament, broad natures, whose failure at examinations spoils their appetites and hinders them from visiting the opera with their usual regularity. I let the first class off easily, but the second I chivy through a whole year.

‘Sit down,’ I say to my visitor; ‘what have you to tell me?’

‘Excuse me, professor, for troubling you,’ he begins, hesitating, and not looking me in the face. ‘I would not have ventured to trouble you if it had not been…I have been up for your examination five times, and have been ploughed.…I beg you, be so good as to mark me for a pass, because.…’

The argument which all the sluggards bring forward on their own behalf is always the same; they have passed well in all their subjects and have only come to grief in mine, and that is the more surprising because they have always been particularly interested in my subject and knew it so well; their failure has always been entirely owing to some incomprehensible misunderstanding.

‘Excuse me, my friend,’ I say to the visitor; ‘I cannot mark you for a pass. Go and read up the lectures and come to me again. Then we shall see.’

A pause. I feel an impulse to torment the student a little for liking beer and the opera better than science, and I say, with a sigh:

‘To my mind, the best thing you can do now is to give up medicine altogether. If, with your abilities, you cannot succeed in passing the examination, it’s evident that you have neither the desire nor the vocation for a doctor’s calling.’

The sanguine youth’s face lengthens.

‘Excuse me, professor,’ he laughs, ‘but that would be odd of me, to say the least of it. After studying for five years, all at once to give it up.’

‘Oh, well! Better to have lost your five years than have to spend the rest of your life in doing work you do not care for.’

But at once I feel sorry for him, and I hasten to add:

‘However, as you think best. And so read a little more and come again.’

‘When?’ the idle youth asks in a hollow voice.

‘When you like. To-morrow if you like.’

And in his good-natured eyes I read:

‘I can come all right, but of course you will plough me again, you beast!’

‘Of course,’ I say, ‘you won’t know more science for going in for my examination another fifteen times, but it is training your character, and you must be thankful for that.’