ay by Saturday, nothing's any use, nothing! I can't
understand how a doctor can be without money!"

"Lord have mercy on us!" Samoylenko whispered rapidly and intensely,
and there was positively a breaking note in his throat. "I've been
stripped of everything; I am owed seven thousand, and I'm in debt
all round. Is it my fault?"

"Then you'll get it by Saturday? Yes?"

"I'll try."

"I implore you, my dear fellow! So that the money may be in my hands
by Friday morning!"

Samoylenko sat down and prescribed solution of quinine and kalii
bromati and tincture of rhubarb, tincturae gentianae, aquae foeniculi
--all in one mixture, added some pink syrup to sweeten it, and
went away.

XI

"You look as though you were coming to arrest me," said Von Koren,
seeing Samoylenko coming in, in his full-dress uniform.

"I was passing by and thought: 'Suppose I go in and pay my respects
to zoology,'" said Samoylenko, sitting down at the big table,
knocked together by the zoologist himself out of plain boards.
"Good-morning, holy father," he said to the deacon, who was sitting
in the window, copying something. "I'll stay a minute and then run
home to see about dinner. It's time. . . . I'm not hindering you?"

"Not in the least," answered the zoologist, laying out over the
table slips of paper covered with small writing. "We are busy
copying."

"Ah! . . . Oh, my goodness, my goodness! . . ." sighed Samoylenko.
He cautiously took up from the table a dusty book on which there
was lying a dead dried spider, and said: "Only fancy, though; some
little green beetle is going about its business, when suddenly a
monster like this swoops down upon it. I can fancy its terror."

"Yes, I suppose so."

"Is poison given it to protect it from its enemies?"

"Yes, to protect it and enable it to attack."

"To be sure, to be sure. . . . And everything in nature, my dear
fellows, is consistent and can be explained," sighed Samoylenko;
"only I tell you what I don't understand. You're a man of very great
intellect, so explain it to me, please. There are, you know, little
beasts no bigger than rats, rather handsome to look at, but nasty
and immoral in the extreme, let me tell you. Suppose such a little
beast is running in the woods. He sees a bird; he catches it and
devours it. He goes on and sees in the grass a nest of eggs; he
does not want to eat them--he is not hungry, but yet he tastes
one egg and scatters the others out of the nest with h