tion with all sorts of
Chinese mannerisms, such as "As you so justly observed," or "I have
already had the honour to inform you"; we cannot help laughing if one
of us makes a joke, however unsuccessfully. When we have finished with
business my colleague gets up impulsively and, waving his hat in the
direction of my work, begins to say good-bye. Again we paw one another
and laugh. I see him into the hall; when I assist my colleague to put
on his coat, while he does all he can to decline this high honour. Then
when Yegor opens the door my colleague declares that I shall catch cold,
while I make a show of being ready to go 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 v