complaints, threats, and reproaches addressed to
his wife.

His poor wife, bustling round him, wore herself out with her efforts.
And indeed he, too, was exhausted in the end. When his polished
boots were brought him from the kitchen he had not strength to pull
them on. He had to lie down and have a drink of water.

"How weak you have grown!" sighed his wife. "You ought not to go
to this dinner at all."

"No advice, please!" the schoolmaster cut her short angrily.

He was in a very bad temper, for he had been much displeased with
the recent examinations. The examinations had gone off splendidly;
all the boys of the senior division had gained certificates and
prizes; both the managers of the factory and the government officials
were pleased with the results; but that was not enough for the
schoolmaster. He was vexed that Babkin, a boy who never made a
mistake in writing, had made three mistakes in the dictation;
Sergeyev, another boy, had been so excited that he could not remember
seventeen times thirteen; the inspector, a young and inexperienced
man, had chosen a difficult article for dictation, and Lyapunov,
the master of a neighbouring school, whom the inspector had asked
to dictate, had not behaved like "a good comrade"; but in dictating
had, as it were, swallowed the words and had not pronounced them
as written.

After pulling on his boots with the assistance of his wife, and
looking at himself once more in the looking-glass, the schoolmaster
took his gnarled stick and set off for the dinner. Just before the
factory manager's house, where the festivity was to take place, he
had a little mishap. He was taken with a violent fit of coughing
. . . . He was so shaken by it that the cap flew off his head and the
stick dropped out of his hand; and when the school inspector and
the teachers, hearing his cough, ran out of the house, he was sitting
on the bottom step, bathed in perspiration.

"Fyodor Lukitch, is that you?" said the inspector, surprised. "You
. . . have come?"

"Why not?"

"You ought to be at home, my dear fellow. You are not at all well
to-day. . . ."

"I am just the same to-day as I was yesterday. And if my presence
is not agreeable to you, I can go back."

"Oh, Fyodor Lukitch, you must not talk like that! Please come in.
Why, the function is really in your honour, not ours. And we are
delighted to see you. Of course we are! . . ."

Within, everything was ready for the banquet. In the big di