u count them. And if you think I don't put enough
in the line, you can take something off my pay."

"Oh dear, that's not the point. You have no delicacy, really. . . .
At the least thing you drag in money. The great thing is to be
exact, Ivan Matveyitch, to be exact is the great thing. You ought
to train yourself to be exact."

The maidservant brings in a tray with two glasses of tea on it, and
a basket of rusks. . . . Ivan Matveyitch takes his glass awkwardly
with both hands, and at once begins drinking it. The tea is too
hot. To avoid burning his mouth Ivan Matveyitch tries to take a
tiny sip. He eats one rusk, then a second, then a third, and, looking
sideways, with embarrassment, at the man of learning, timidly
stretches after a fourth. . . . The noise he makes in swallowing,
the relish with which he smacks his lips, and the expression of
hungry greed in his raised eyebrows irritate the man of learning.

"Make haste and finish, time is precious."

"You dictate, I can drink and write at the same time. . . . I must
confess I was hungry."

"I should think so after your walk!"

"Yes, and what wretched weather! In our parts there is a scent of
spring by now. . . . There are puddles everywhere; the snow is
melting."

"You are a southerner, I suppose?"

"From the Don region. . . . It's quite spring with us by March.
Here it is frosty, everyone's in a fur coat, . . . but there you
can see the grass . . . it's dry everywhere, and one can even catch
tarantulas."

"And what do you catch tarantulas for?"

"Oh! . . . to pass the time . . ." says Ivan Matveyitch, and he
sighs. "It's fun catching them. You fix a bit of pitch on a thread,
let it down into their hole and begin hitting the tarantula on the
back with the pitch, and the brute gets cross, catches hold of the
pitch with his claws, and gets stuck. . . . And what we used to do
with them! We used to put a basinful of them together and drop a
bihorka in with them."

"What is a bihorka?"

"That's another spider, very much the same as a tarantula. In a
fight one of them can kill a hundred tarantulas."

"H'm! . . . But we must write, . . . Where did we stop?"

The man of learning dictates another twenty lines, then sits plunged
in meditation.

Ivan Matveyitch, waiting while the other cogitates, sits and, craning
his neck, puts the collar of his shirt to rights. His tie will not
set properly, the stud has come out, and the collar keeps coming
apart.

"H'm