along the road and soon overtook the doctor. It was Abogin driving
off to protest, to do absurd things. . . .

All the way home the doctor thought not of his wife, nor of his
Andrey, but of Abogin and the people in the house he had just left.
His thoughts were unjust and inhumanly cruel. He condemned Abogin
and his wife and Paptchinsky and all who lived in rosy, subdued
light among sweet perfumes, and all the way home he hated and
despised them till his head ached. And a firm conviction concerning
those people took shape in his mind.

Time will pass and Kirilov's sorrow will pass, but that conviction,
unjust and unworthy of the human heart, will not pass, but will
remain in the doctor's mind to the grave.


THE EXAMINING MAGISTRATE

A DISTRICT doctor and an examining magistrate were driving one fine
spring day to an inquest. The examining magistrate, a man of five
and thirty, looked dreamily at the horses and said:

"There is a great deal that is enigmatic and obscure in nature; and
even in everyday life, doctor, one must often come upon phenomena
which are absolutely incapable of explanation. I know, for instance,
of several strange, mysterious deaths, the cause of which only
spiritualists and mystics will undertake to explain; a clear-headed
man can only lift up his hands in perplexity. For example, I know
of a highly cultured lady who foretold her own death and died without
any apparent reason on the very day she had predicted. She said