My lawyer told me yesterday that once I've been reported weak-minded I can make capital out of it for the rest of my life."

"I don't trust the medical authorities," remarked a man of intelligent appearance. "Once when I forged some bills of exchange I went to a lecture by Dr. Heveroch, and when they nabbed me I pretended to have an epileptic fit, just like Dr. Heveroch described it. I bit the leg of one of the medical authorities on the commission and drank the ink out of an inkpot. But just because I bit a man in the calf they reported I was quite well, and so I was done for."

"I am not afraid of their examination," declared Schweik. "When I was in the army, I was examined by a veterinary surgeon and I got on first rate."

"The medical authorities are a rotten lot," announced a small,

misshapen man. "Not long ago they happened to dig up a skeleton on my field and the medical authorities said the skeleton had been murdered by some blunt instrument forty years previously. Now I'm only thirty-eight, but they locked me up, though I've got a birth certificate, a certificate of baptism and a copy of the entry in the parish register."

"I think," said Schweik, "that we ought to look at everything fair and square. Anybody can make a mistake, and the more he thinks about a thing, the more mistakes he's bound to make. The medical authorities are human beings, and human beings have got their failings. That's like once at Nusle, just by the bridge, a gentleman came up to me one night when I was on my way home and hit me over the head with a horsewhip and when I was lying on the ground he flashed a light on me and said : 'I've made a mistake, that's not him.' And it made him so wild to think he'd made a mistake that he landed me another whack across the back. It's just in the course of nature for a man to keep on making mistakes till he's dead. That's like the gentleman who found a mad dog half-frozen one night and took it home with him and shoved it into his wife's bed. As soon as the dog got warm and came to, it bit the whole family, and the youngest baby that was still in the cradle got torn to pieces and gobbled up by it. Or I can give you another example of a mistake that was made by a cabinetmaker who lived in the same house as me. He opened the church at Podol with his latchkey, thinking he was at home, undressed in the sacristy, thinking it was the kitchen, and lay down on the altar, thinking he was at home in bed and he covered himself over with some of those counterpanes with scripture texts on them and he put the gospel and other sacred books under his head to keep it propped up. In the morning the verger found him and when he came to his senses, he told him in quite a cheerful sort of way that it was a mistake. 'A fine mistake,' said the verger, 'seeing as now we've got to have the church consecrated all over again because of it.' And here's another example I can give you of a mistake made by a police dog at Kladno. A wolf hound belonging to a Sergeant Roter, whom I daresay you've heard of. This Sergeant Roter used to train these dogs and make experiments on tramps, till at last all the tramps began to give the

Kladno district a wide berth. So he gave orders that the gendarmes must run in any suspicious person at all costs. Well, one day they ran in a fairly well-dressed man whom they found sitting on the stump of a tree in the woods. They at once snipped off a piece of his coat tails and let the police dogs have a sniff at it. Then they took the man into a brick works outside the town and let the trained dogs follow his tracks. The dogs found him and brought him back. Then the man had to climb a ladder into an attic, vault over a wall, jump into a pond, with the dogs after him. In the end it turned out that the man was a Czech radical M. P. who had taken a trip to the woods, through being so sick and tired of parliament.