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