in, I am
dying!"

"I beg you not to excite yourself and to answer the questions I am
about to put to you. The very fact that you are excited prevents
me from understanding you. You have drunk paraffin. Yes?"

"Yes, paraffin! Please save me!"

The chemist went coolly and gravely to the desk, opened a book,
became absorbed in reading it. After reading a couple of pages he
shrugged one shoulder and then the other, made a contemptuous grimace
and, after thinking for a minute, went into the adjoining room. The
clock struck four, and when it pointed to ten minutes past the
chemist came back with another book and again plunged into reading.

"H'm," he said as though puzzled, "the very fact that you feel
unwell shows you ought to apply to a doctor, not a chemist."

"But I have been to the doctors already. I could not ring them up."

"H'm . . . you don't regard us chemists as human beings, and disturb
our rest even at four o'clock at night, though every dog, every
cat, can rest in peace. . . . You don't try to understand anything,
and to your thinking we are not people and our nerves are like
cords."

Strizhin listened to the chemist, heaved a sigh, and went home.

"So I am fated to die," he thought.

And in his mouth was a burning and a taste of paraffin, there were
twinges in his stomach, and a sound of boom, boom, boom in his ears.
Every moment it seemed to him that his end was near, that his heart
was no longer beating.

Returning home he made haste to write: "Let no one be blamed for
my death," then he said his prayers, lay down and pulled the
bedclothes over his head. He lay awake till morning expecting death,
and all the time he kept fancying how his grave would be covered
with fresh green grass and how the birds would twitter over it. . . .

And in the morning he was sitting on his bed, saying with a smile
to Dashenka:

"One who leads a steady and regular life, dear sister, is unaffected
by any poison. Take me, for example. I have been on the verge of
death. I was dying and in agony, yet now I am all right. There is
only a burning in my mouth and a soreness in my throat, but I am
all right all over, thank God. . . . And why? It's because of my
regular life."

"No, it's because it's inferior paraffin!" sighed Dashenka, thinking
of the household expenses and gazing into space. "The man at the
shop could not have given me the best quality, but that at three
farthings. I am a martyr, I am a miserable woman.