n
for the "mere candidate" and a knowledge that the "mere candidate's"
soul was filled with envy and admiration of them. I was charmed to think
that every one near me could now see that I knew two real second-course
students: wherefore I hastened to meet them half-way.

Woloda, of course, could not help vaunting his superiority a little.

"Hullo, you smug!" he said. "Haven't you been examined yet?"

"No."

"Well, what are you reading? Aren't you sufficiently primed?"

"Yes, except in two questions. I don't understand them at all."

"Eh, what?"--and Woloda straightway began to expound to me Newton's
Binomial, but so rapidly and unintelligibly that, suddenly reading in my
eyes certain misgivings as to the soundness of his knowledge, he glanced
also at Dimitri's face. Clearly, he saw the same misgivings there, for
he blushed hotly, though still continuing his involved explanations.

"No; hold on, Woloda, and let me try and do it," put in Dimitri at
length, with a glance at the professors' corner as he seated himself
beside me.

I could see that my friend was in the best of humours. This was always
the case with him when he was satisfied with himself, and was one of the
things in him which I liked best. Inasmuch as he knew mathematics well
and could speak clearly, he hammered the question so thoroughly into my
head that I can remember it to this day. Hardly had he finished when St.
Jerome said to me in a loud whisper, "A vous, Nicolas," and I followed
Ikonin out from among the desks without having had an opportunity of
going through the OTHER question of which I was ignorant. At the table
which we now approached were seated two professors, while before the
blackboard stood a gymnasium student, who was working some formula
aloud, and knocking bits off the end of the chalk with his too vigorous
strokes. He even continued writing after one of the Professors had said
to him "Enough!" and bidden us draw our tickets. "Suppose I get the
Theory of Combinations?" I thought to myself as my tremulous fingers
took a ticket from among a bundle wrapped in torn paper. Ikonin, for
his part, reached across the table with the same assurance, and the
same sidelong movement of his whole body, as he had done at the previous
examination. Taking the topmost ticket without troubling to make further
selection, he just glanced at it, and then frowned angrily.

"I always draw this kind of thing," he muttered.

I looked at mine. Horrors! It