“No, I haven’t.”

“You haven’t!  He wrote very clever articles in the Harkov Gazette, and was preparing to be a professor.  Well, I read a great deal and attended the student’s societies, where you hear nothing that is commonplace.  I was working up for six months, but as one has to have been through the whole high-school course of mathematics to enter the technical school, Grumaher advised me to try for the veterinary institute, where they admit high-school boys from the sixth form.  Of course, I began working for it.  I did not want to be a veterinary surgeon but they told me that after finishing the course at the veterinary institute I should be admitted to the faculty of medicine without examination.  I learnt all Kuehner; I could read Cornelius Nepos, a livre ouvert; and in Greek I read through almost all Curtius.  But, you know, one thing and another, . . . the students leaving and the uncertainty of my position, and then I heard that my mamma had come and was looking for me all over Harkov.  Then I went away.  What was I to do?  But luckily I learned that there was a school of mines here on the Donets line.  Why should I not enter that?  You know the school of mines qualifies one as a mining foreman—­a splendid berth.  I know of mines where the foremen get a salary of fifteen hundred a year.  Capital. . . .  I entered it. . . .”

With an expression of reverent awe on his face Alexandr Ivanitch enumerated some two dozen abstruse sciences in which instruction was given at the school of mines; he described the school itself, the construction of the shafts, and the condition of the miners. . . .  Then he told me a terrible story which sounded like an invention, though I could not help believing it, for his tone in telling it was too genuine and the expression of horror on his Semitic face was too evidently sincere.

“While I was doing the practical work, I had such an accident one day!” he said, raising both eyebrows.  “I was at a mine here in the Donets district.  You have seen, I dare say, how people are let down into the mine.  You remember when they start the horse and set the gates moving one bucket on the pulley goes down into the mine, while the other comes up; when the first begins to come up, then the second goes down—­exactly like a well with two pails.  Well, one day I got into the bucket, began going down, and can you fancy, all at once I heard, Trrr!  The chain had broken and I flew to the devil together with the bucket and the broken bit of chain. . . .  I fell from a height of twenty feet, flat on my chest and stomach, while the bucket, being heavier, reached the bottom before me, and I hit this shoulder here against its edge.  I lay, you know, stunned.  I thought I was killed, and all at once I saw a fresh calamity:  the other bucket, which was going up, having lost the counter-balancing weight, was coming down with a crash straight upon me. . . .  What was I to do?  Seeing the position, I squeezed closer to the wall, crouching and waiting for the bucket to come full crush next minute on my head.  I thought of papa and mamma and Mogilev and Grumaher. . . .  I prayed. . . .  But happily . . . it frightens me even to think of it. . . .”