Psychiatry with its modern classification of mental diseases, methods of diagnosis, and treatment, was a perfect Elborus in comparison with what had been in the past.  They no longer poured cold water on the heads of lunatics nor put strait-waistcoats upon them; they treated them with humanity, and even, so it was stated in the papers, got up balls and entertainments for them.  Andrey Yefimitch knew that with modern tastes and views such an abomination as Ward No. 6 was possible only a hundred and fifty miles from a railway in a little town where the mayor and all the town council were half-illiterate tradesmen who looked upon the doctor as an oracle who must be believed without any criticism even if he had poured molten lead into their mouths; in any other place the public and the newspapers would long ago have torn this little Bastille to pieces.

“But, after all, what of it?” Andrey Yefimitch would ask himself, opening his eyes.  “There is the antiseptic system, there is Koch, there is Pasteur, but the essential reality is not altered a bit; ill-health and mortality are still the same.  They get up balls and entertainments for the mad, but still they don’t let them go free; so it’s all nonsense and vanity, and there is no difference in reality between the best Vienna clinic and my hospital.”  But depression and a feeling akin to envy prevented him from feeling indifferent; it must have been owing to exhaustion.  His heavy head sank on to the book, he put his hands under his face to make it softer, and thought:  “I serve in a pernicious institution and receive a salary from people whom I am deceiving.  I am not honest, but then, I of myself am nothing, I am only part of an inevitable social evil:  all local officials are pernicious and receive their salary for doing nothing. . . .  And so for my dishonesty it is not I who am to blame, but the times....  If I had been born two hundred years later I should have been different. . .”

When it struck three he would put out his lamp and go into his bedroom; he was not sleepy.

VIII

Two years before, the Zemstvo in a liberal mood had decided to allow three hundred roubles a year to pay for additional medical service in the town till the Zemstvo hospital should be opened, and the district doctor, Yevgeny Fyodoritch Hobotov, was invited to the town to assist Andrey Yefimitch.  He was a very young man—­not yet thirty—­tall and dark, with broad cheek-bones and little eyes; his forefathers had probably come from one of the many alien races of Russia.  He arrived in the town without a farthing, with a small portmanteau, and a plain young woman whom he called his cook.  This woman had a baby at the breast.  Yevgeny Fyodoritch used to go about in a cap with a peak, and in high boots, and in the winter wore a sheepskin.  He made great friends with Sergey Sergeyitch, the medical assistant, and with the treasurer, but held aloof from