There reigns the silence of the tomb. 'Why are you silent?' Voinitsin is mute. The assistant-examiner begins to be restive. 'Well, say something!' Voinitsin is as still as if he were dead. All his companions gaze inquisitively at the back of his thick, close-cropped, motionless head. The assistant-examiner's eyes are almost starting out of his head; he positively hates Voinitsin. 'Well, this is strange, really,' observes the other examiner. 'Why do you stand as if you were dumb? Come, don't you know it? if so, say so.' 'Let me take another question,' the luckless youth articulates thickly. The professors look at one another.' Well, take one,' the head-examiner answers, with a wave of the hand. Voinitsin again takes a paper, again goes to the window, again returns to the table, and again is silent as the grave. The assistant-examiner is capable of devouring him alive. At last they send him away and mark him a nought. You would think, 'Now, at least, he will go.' Not a bit of it! He goes back to his place, sits just as immovably to the end of the examination, and, as he goes out, exclaims: 'I've been on the rack! what ill-luck!' and the whole of that day he wanders about Moscow, clutching every now and then at his head, and bitterly cursing his luckless fate. He never, of course, touched a book, and the next day the same story was repeated. So this was the Voinitsin who joined me. We talked about Moscow, about sport. 'Would you like me,' he whispered to me suddenly, 'to introduce you to the first wit of these parts?' 'If you will be so kind.' Voinitsin led me up to a little man, with a high tuft of hair on his forehead and moustaches, in a cinnamon-coloured frock-coat and striped cravat. His yellow, mobile features were certainly full of cleverness and sarcasm. His lips were perpetually curved in a flitting ironical smile; little black eyes, screwed up with an impudent expression, looked out from under uneven lashes. Beside him stood a country gentleman, broad, soft, and sweet--a veritable sugar-and-honey mixture--with one eye. He laughed in anticipation at the witticisms of the little man, and seemed positively melting with delight. Voinitsin presented me to the wit, whose name was Piotr Petrovitch Lupihin. We were introduced and exchanged the preliminary civilities. 'Allow me to present to you my best friend,' said Lupihin suddenly in a strident voice, seizing the sugary gentleman by the arm. 'Come, don't resist, Kirila Selifanitch,' he added; 'we're not going to bite you. I commend him to you,' he went on, while the embarrassed Kirila Selifanitch bowed with about as much grace as if he were undergoing a surgical operation; 'he's a most superior gentleman. He enjoyed excellent health up to the age of fifty, then suddenly conceived the idea of doctoring his eyes, in consequence of which he has lost one. Since then he doctors his peasants with similar success.... They, to be sure, repay with similar devotion...'