All went well until my examination in Latin. So far, a gymnasium student stood first on the list, Semenoff second, and myself third. On the strength of it I had begun to swagger a little, and to think that, for all my youth, I was not to be despised.

From the first day of the examinations, I had heard every one speak with awe¹ of the Professor of Latin, who appeared to be some sort of a wild beast who battened on the financial ruin of young men (of those, that is to say, who paid their own fees) and spoke² only in the Greek and Latin tongues. However, St. Jerome, who had coached me in Latin, spoke encouragingly, and I myself thought that, since I could translate Cicero and certain parts of Horace without the aid of a lexicon³, I should do no worse than the rest. Yet things proved otherwise. All the morning the air had been full of rumours⁴ concerning the tribulations⁵ of candidates who had gone up before me: rumours of how one young fellow had been accorded a nought⁶, another one a single mark only, a third one greeted with abuse and threatened with expulsion, and so forth⁷. Only Semenoff and the first gymnasium student had, as usual, gone up quietly, and returned to their seats with five marks credited to their names. Already I felt a prescience of disaster when Ikonin and myself found ourselves summoned to the little table at which the terrible professor sat in solitary⁸ grandeur⁹.

The terrible professor turned out to be a little thin, bilious- looking man with hair long and greasy¹⁰ and a face

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