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The Mysterious Stranger A Romance ............................................................................................................1

IT WAS IN 1590winter. Austria was far away from the world, and asleep; it was still the Middle Ages in

Austria, and promised to remain so forever. Some even set it away back centuries upon centuries and said

that by the mental and spiritual clock it was still the Age of Belief in Austria. But they meant it as a

compliment, not a slur, and it was so taken, and we were all proud of it. I remember it well, although I was

Yes, Austria was far from the world, and asleep, and our village was in the middle of that sleep, being in the

middle of Austria. It drowsed in peace in the deep privacy of a hilly and woodsy solitude where news from

the world hardly ever came to disturb its dreams, and was infinitely content. At its front flowed the tranquil

river, its surface painted with cloudforms and the reflections of drifting arks and stoneboats; behind it rose

the woody steeps to the base of the lofty precipice; from the top of the precipice frowned a vast castle, its

long stretch of towers and bastions mailed in vines; beyond the river, a league to the left, was a tumbled

expanse of forestclothed hills cloven by winding gorges where the sun never penetrated; and to the right a

precipice overlooked the river, and between it and the hills just spoken of lay a farreaching plain dotted with

The whole region for leagues around was the hereditary property of a prince, whose servants kept the castle

always in perfect condition for occupancy, but neither he nor his family came there oftener than once in five

years. When they came it was as if the lord of the world had arrived, and had brought all the glories of its

kingdoms along; and when they went they left a calm behind which was like the deep sleep which follows an

Eseldorf was a paradise for us boys. We were not overmuch pestered with schooling. Mainly we were trained

to be good Christians; to revere the Virgin, the Church, and the saints above everything. Beyond these

matters we were not required to know much; and, in fact, not allowed to. Knowledge was not good for the

common people, and could make them discontented with the lot which God had appointed for them, and God

would not endure discontentment with His plans. We had two priests. One of them, Father Adolf, was a very

There may have been better priests, in some ways, than Father Adolf, but there was never one in our

commune who was held in more solemn and awful respect. This was because he had absolutely no fear of the

Devil. He was the only Christian I have ever known of whom that could be truly said. People stood in deep

dread of him on that account; for they thought that there must be something supernatural about him, else he

could not be so bold and so confident. All men speak in bitter disapproval of the Devil, but they do it

reverently, not flippantly; but Father Adolf's way was very different; he called him by every name he could

lay his tongue to, and it made everyone shudder that heard him; and often he would even speak of him

scornfully and scoffingly; then the people crossed themselves and went quickly out of his presence, fearing

Father Adolf had actually met Satan face to face more than once, and defied him. This was known to be so.

Father Adolf said it himself. He never made any secret of it, but spoke it right out. And that he was speaking

true there was proof in at least one instance, for on that occasion he quarreled with the enemy, and intrepidly

threw his bottle at him; and there, upon the wall of his study, was the ruddy splotch where it struck and broke.

But it was Father Peter, the other priest, that we all loved best and were sorriest for. Some people charged

him with talking around in conversation that God was all goodness and would find a way to save all his poor

human children. It was a horrible thing to say, but there was never any absolute proof that Father Peter said it;

and it was out of character for him to say it, too, for he was always good and gentle and truthful. He wasn't

charged with saying it in the pulpit, where all the congregation could hear and testify, but only outside, in

talk; and it is easy for enemies to manufacture that. Father Peter had an enemy and a very powerful one, the

astrologer who lived in a tumbled old tower up the valley, and put in his nights studying the stars. Every one

knew he could foretell wars and famines, though that was not so hard, for there was always a war, and

generally a famine somewhere. But he could also read any man's life through the stars in a big book he had,

and find lost property, and every one in the village except Father Peter stood in awe of him. Even Father

Adolf, who had defied the Devil, had a wholesome respect for the astrologer when he came through our

village wearing his tall, pointed hat and his long, flowing robe with stars on it, carrying his big book, and a

staff which was known to have magic power. The bishop himself sometimes listened to the astrologer, it was

said, for, besides studying the stars and prophesying, the astrologer made a great show of piety, which would

But Father Peter took no stock in the astrologer. He denounced him openly as a charlatana fraud with no

valuable knowledge of any kind, or powers beyond those of an ordinary and rather inferior human being,

which naturally made the astrologer hate Father Peter and wish to ruin him. It was the astrologer, as we all

believed, who originated the story about Father Peter's shocking remark and carried it to the bishop. It was

said that Father Peter had made the remark to his niece, Marget, though Marget denied it and implored the

bishop to believe her and spare her old uncle from poverty and disgrace. But the bishop wouldn't listen. He

suspended Father Peter indefinitely, though he wouldn't go so far as to excommunicate him on the evidence

of only one witness; and now Father Peter had been out a couple of years, and our other priest, Father Adolf,

Those had been hard years for the old priest and Marget. They had been favorites, but of course that changed

when they came under the shadow of the bishop's frown. Many of their friends fell away entirely, and the rest

became cool and distant. Marget was a lovely girl of eighteen when the trouble came, and she had the best

head in the village, and the most in it. She taught the harp, and earned all her clothes and pocket money by

her own industry. But her scholars fell off one by one now; she was forgotten when there were dances and

parties among the youth of the village; the young fellows stopped coming to the house, all except Wilhelm

Meidlingand he could have been spared; she and her uncle were sad and forlorn in their neglect and

disgrace, and the sunshine was gone out of their lives. Matters went worse and worse, all through the two

years. Clothes were wearing out, bread was harder and harder to get. And now, at last, the very end was

come. Solomon Isaacs had lent all the money he was willing to put on the house, and gave notice that

Three of us boys were always together, and had been so from the cradle, being fond of one another from the

beginning, and this affection deepened as the years went onNikolaus Bauman, son of the principal judge of

the local court; Seppi Wohlmeyer, son of the keeper of the principal inn, the "Golden Stag," which had a nice

garden, with shade trees reaching down to the riverside, and pleasure boats for hire; and I was the

thirdTheodor Fischer, son of the church organist, who was also leader of the village musicians, teacher of

the violin, composer, taxcollector of the commune, sexton, and in other ways a useful citizen, and respected

by all. We knew the hills and the woods as well as the birds knew them; for we were always roaming them

when we had leisureat least, when we were not swimming or boating or fishing, or playing on the ice or

And we had the run of the castle park, and very few had that. It was because we were pets of the oldest

servingman in the castleFelix Brandt; and often we went there, nights, to hear him talk about old times and

strange things, and to smoke with him (he taught us that) and to drink coffee; for he had served in the wars,

and was at the siege of Vienna; and there, when the Turks were defeated and driven away, among the

captured things were bags of coffee, and the Turkish prisoners explained the character of it and how to make

a pleasant drink out of it, and now he always kept coffee by him, to drink himself and also to astonish the

ignorant with. When it stormed he kept us all night; and while it thundered and lightened outside he told us

about ghosts and horrors of every kind, and of battles and murders and mutilations, and such things, and

made it pleasant and cozy inside; and he told these things from his own experience largely. He had seen many

ghosts in his time, and witches and enchanters, and once he was lost in a fierce storm at midnight in the

mountains, and by the glare of the lightning had seen the Wild Huntsman rage on the blast with his specter

dogs chasing after him through the driving cloudrack. Also he had seen an incubus once, and several times

he had seen the great bat that sucks the blood from the necks of people while they are asleep, fanning them

He encouraged us not to fear supernatural things, such as ghosts, and said they did no harm, but only

wandered about because they were lonely and distressed and wanted kindly notice and compassion; and in

time we learned not to be afraid, and even went down with him in the night to the haunted chamber in the

dungeons of the castle. The ghost appeared only once, and it went by very dim to the sight and floated

noiseless through the air, and then disappeared; and we scarcely trembled, he had taught us so well. He said it

came up sometimes in the night and woke him by passing its clammy hand over his face, but it did him no

hurt; it only wanted sympathy and notice. But the strangest thing was that he had seen angelsactual angels

out of heavenand had talked with them. They had no wings, and wore clothes, and talked and looked and

acted just like any natural person, and you would never know them for angels except for the wonderful things

they did which a mortal could not do, and the way they suddenly disappeared while you were talking with

them, which was also a thing which no mortal could do. And he said they were pleasant and cheerful, not

It was after that kind of a talk one May night that we got up next morning and had a good breakfast with him

and then went down and crossed the bridge and went away up into the hills on the left to a woody hilltop

which was a favorite place of ours, and there we stretched out on the grass in the shade to rest and smoke and

talk over these strange things, for they were in our minds yet, and impressing us. But we couldn't smoke,

Soon there came a youth strolling toward us through the trees, and he sat down and began to talk in a friendly

way, just as if he knew us. But we did not answer him, for he was a stranger and we were not used to

strangers and were shy of them. He had new and good clothes on, and was handsome and had a winning face

and a pleasant voice, and was easy and graceful and unembarrassed, not slouchy and awkward and diffident,

like other boys. We wanted to be friendly with him, but didn't know how to begin. Then I thought of the pipe,

and wondered if it would be taken as kindly meant if I offered it to him. But I remembered that we had no

fire, so I was sorry and disappointed. But he looked up bright and pleased, and said:

I was so astonished I couldn't speak; for I had not said anything. He took the pipe and blew his breath on it,

and the tobacco glowed red, and spirals of blue smoke rose up. We jumped up and were going to run, for that

was natural; and we did run a few steps, although he was yearningly pleading for us to stay, and giving us his

word that he would not do us any harm, but only wanted to be friends with us and have company. So we

stopped and stood, and wanted to go back, being full of curiosity and wonder, but afraid to venture. He went

on coaxing, in his soft, persuasive way; and when we saw that the pipe did not blow up and nothing

happened, our confidence returned by little and little, and presently our curiosity got to be stronger than our

He was bent on putting us at ease, and he had the right art; one could not remain doubtful and timorous where

a person was so earnest and simple and gentle, and talked so alluringly as he did; no, he won us over, and it

was not long before we were content and comfortable and chatty, and glad we had found this new friend.

When the feeling of constraint was all gone we asked him how he had learned to do that strange thing, and he

said he hadn't learned it at all; it came natural to himlike other thingsother curious things.

We said we wouldn't, and he went to a puddle and came back with water in a cup which he had made out of a

leaf, and blew upon it and threw it out, and it was a lump of ice the shape of the cup. We were astonished and

charmed, but not afraid any more; we were very glad to be there, and asked him to go on and do some more

things. And he did. He said he would give us any kind of fruit we liked, whether it was in season or not. We

"They are in your pockets," he said, and it was true. And they were of the best, too, and we ate them and

"You will find them where those came from," he said, "and everything else your appetites call for; and you

need not name the thing you wish; as long as I am with you, you have only to wish and find."

And he said true. There was never anything so wonderful and so interesting. Bread, cakes, sweets,

nutswhatever one wanted, it was there. He ate nothing himself, but sat and chatted, and did one curious

thing after another to amuse us. He made a tiny toy squirrel out of clay, and it ran up a tree and sat on a limb

overhead and barked down at us. Then he made a dog that was not much larger than a mouse, and it treed the

squirrel and danced about the tree, excited and barking, and was as alive as any dog could be. It frightened

the squirrel from tree to tree and followed it up until both were out of sight in the forest. He made birds out of

"An angel," he said, quite simply, and set another bird free and clapped his hands and made it fly away.

A kind of awe fell upon us when we heard him say that, and we were afraid again; but he said we need not be

troubled, there was no occasion for us to be afraid of an angel, and he liked us, anyway. He went on chatting

as simply and unaffectedly as ever; and while he talked he made a crowd of little men and women the size of

your finger, and they went diligently to work and cleared and leveled off a space a couple of yards square in

the grass and began to build a cunning little castle in it, the women mixing the mortar and carrying it up the

scaffoldings in pails on their heads, just as our workwomen have always done, and the men laying the

courses of masonryfive hundred of these toy people swarming briskly about and working diligently and

wiping the sweat off their faces as natural as life. In the absorbing interest of watching those five hundred

little people make the castle grow step by step and course by course, and take shape and symmetry, that

feeling and awe soon passed away and we were quite comfortable and at home again. We asked if we might

make some people, and he said yes, and told Seppi to make some cannon for the walls, and told Nikolaus to

make some halberdiers, with breastplates and greaves and helmets, and I was to make some cavalry, with

horses, and in allotting these tasks he called us by our names, but did not say how he knew them. Then Seppi

asked him what his own name was, and he said, tranquilly, "Satan," and held out a chip and caught a little

woman on it who was falling from the scaffolding and put her back where she belonged, and said, "She is an

It caught us suddenly, that name did, and our work dropped out of our hands and broke to piecesa cannon,

a halberdier, and a horse. Satan laughed, and asked what was the matter. I said, "Nothing, only it seemed a

He said it placidly, but it took our breath for a moment and made our hearts beat. He did not seem to notice

that, but mended our halberdiers and things with a touch, handing them to us finished, and said, "Don't you

"It is a good familyours," said Satan; "there is not a better. He is the only member of it that has ever

I should not be able to make any one understand how exciting it all was. You know that kind of quiver that

trembles around through you when you are seeing something so strange and enchanting and wonderful that it

is just a fearful joy to be alive and look at it; and you know how you gaze, and your lips turn dry and your

breath comes short, but you wouldn't be anywhere but there, not for the world. I was bursting to ask one

questionI had it on my tongue's end and could hardly hold it backbut I was ashamed to ask it; it might

be a rudeness. Satan set an ox down that he had been making, and smiled up at me and said:

"It wouldn't be a rudeness, and I should forgive it if it was. Have I seen him? Millions of times. From the time

that I was a little child a thousand years old I was his second favorite among the nursery angels of our blood

and lineageto use a human phraseyes, from that time until the Fall, eight thousand years, measured as

"Yes." He turned to Seppi, and went on as if answering something that was in Seppi's mind: "Why, naturally I

look like a boy, for that is what I am. With us what you call time is a spacious thing; it takes a long stretch of

it to grow an angel to full age." There was a question in my mind, and he turned to me and answered it, "I am

sixteen thousand years oldcounting as you count." Then he turned to Nikolaus and said: "No, the Fall did

not affect me nor the rest of the relationship. It was only he that I was named for who ate of the fruit of the

tree and then beguiled the man and the woman with it. We others are still ignorant of sin; we are not able to

commit it; we are without blemish, and shall abide in that estate always. We" Two of the little workmen

were quarreling, and in buzzing little bumblebee voices they were cursing and swearing at each other; now

came blows and blood; then they locked themselves together in a lifeanddeath struggle. Satan reached out

his hand and crushed the life out of them with his fingers, threw them away, wiped the red from his fingers on

his handkerchief, and went on talking where he had left off: "We cannot do wrong; neither have we any

It seemed a strange speech, in the circumstances, but we barely noticed that, we were so shocked and grieved

at the wanton murder he had committedfor murder it was, that was its true name, and it was without

palliation or excuse, for the men had not wronged him in any way. It made us miserable, for we loved him,

and had thought him so noble and so beautiful and gracious, and had honestly believed he was an angel; and

to have him do this cruel thingah, it lowered him so, and we had had such pride in him. He went right on

talking, just as if nothing had happened, telling about his travels, and the interesting things he had seen in the

big worlds of our solar systems and of other solar systems far away in the remotenesses of space, and about

the customs of the immortals that inhabit them, somehow fascinating us, enchanting us, charming us in spite

of the pitiful scene that was now under our eyes, for the wives of the little dead men had found the crushed

and shapeless bodies and were crying over them, and sobbing and lamenting, and a priest was kneeling there

with his hands crossed upon his breast, praying; and crowds and crowds of pitying friends were massed about

them, reverently uncovered, with their bare heads bowed, and many with the tears running downa scene

which Satan paid no attention to until the small noise of the weeping and praying began to annoy him, then

he reached out and took the heavy board seat out of our swing and brought it down and mashed all those

people into the earth just as if they had been flies, and went on talking just the same.

An angel, and kill a priest! An angel who did not know how to do wrong, and yet destroys in cold blood

hundreds of helpless poor men and women who had never done him any harm! It made us sick to see that

awful deed, and to think that none of those poor creatures was prepared except the priest, for none of them

had ever heard a mass or seen a church. And we were witnesses; we had seen these murders done and it was

But he went on talking right along, and worked his enchantments upon us again with that fatal music of his

voice. He made us forget everything; we could only listen to him, and love him, and be his slaves, to do with

us as he would. He made us drunk with the joy of being with him, and of looking into the heaven of his eyes,

and of feeling the ecstasy that thrilled along our veins from the touch of his hand.

The Stranger had seen everything, he had been everywhere, he knew everything, and he forgot nothing. What

another must study, he learned at a glance; there were no difficulties for him. And he made things live before

you when he told about them. He saw the world made; he saw Adam created; he saw Samson surge against

the pillars and bring the temple down in ruins about him; he saw Caesar's death; he told of the daily life in

heaven; he had seen the damned writhing in the red waves of hell; and he made us see all these things, and it

was as if we were on the spot and looking at them with our own eyes. And we felt them, too, but there was no

sign that they were anything to him beyond mere entertainments. Those visions of hell, those poor babes and

women and girls and lads and men shrieking and supplicating in anguishwhy, we could hardly bear it, but

he was as bland about it as if it had been so many imitation rats in an artificial fire.

And always when he was talking about men and women here on the earth and their doingseven their

grandest and sublimestwe were secretly ashamed, for his manner showed that to him they and their doings

were of paltry poor consequence; often you would think he was talking about flies, if you didn't know. Once

he even said, in so many words, that our people down here were quite interesting to him, notwithstanding

they were so dull and ignorant and trivial and conceited, and so diseased and rickety, and such a shabby,

poor, worthless lot all around. He said it in a quite matterofcourse way and without bitterness, just as a

person might talk about bricks or manure or any other thing that was of no consequence and hadn't feelings. I

could see he meant no offense, but in my thoughts I set it down as not very good manners.

"Manners!" he said. "Why, it is merely the truth, and truth is good manners; manners are a fiction. The castle

Any one would have been obliged to like it. It was lovely to look at, it was so shapely and fine, and so

cunningly perfect in all its particulars, even to the little flags waving from the turrets. Satan said we must put

the artillery in place now, and station the halberdiers and display the cavalry. Our men and horses were a

spectacle to see, they were so little like what they were intended for; for, of course, we had no art in making

such things. Satan said they were the worst he had seen; and when he touched them and made them alive, it

was just ridiculous the way they acted, on account of their legs not being of uniform lengths. They reeled and

sprawled around as if they were drunk, and endangered everybody's lives around them, and finally fell over

and lay helpless and kicking. It made us all laugh, though it was a shameful thing to see. The guns were

charged with dirt, to fire a salute, but they were so crooked and so badly made that they all burst when they

went off, and killed some of the gunners and crippled the others. Satan said we would have a storm now, and

an earthquake, if we liked, but we must stand off a piece, out of danger. We wanted to call the people away,

too, but he said never mind them; they were of no consequence, and we could make more, some time or

A small stormcloud began to settle down black over the castle, and the miniature lightning and thunder

began to play, and the ground to quiver, and the wind to pipe and wheeze, and the rain to fall, and all the

people flocked into the castle for shelter. The cloud settled down blacker and blacker, and one could see the

castle only dimly through it; the lightning blazed out flash upon flash and pierced the castle and set it on fire,

and the flames shone out red and fierce through the cloud, and the people came flying out, shrieking, but

Satan brushed them back, paying no attention to our begging and crying and imploring; and in the midst of

the howling of the wind and volleying of the thunder the magazine blew up, the earthquake rent the ground

wide, and the castle's wreck and ruin tumbled into the chasm, which swallowed it from sight, and closed upon

it, with all that innocent life, not one of the five hundred poor creatures escaping. Our hearts were broken; we

It was of no use to try to move him; evidently he was wholly without feeling, and could not understand. He

was full of bubbling spirits, and as gay as if this were a wedding instead of a fiendish massacre. And he was

bent on making us feel as he did, and of course his magic accomplished his desire. It was no trouble to him;

he did whatever he pleased with us. In a little while we were dancing on that grave, and he was playing to us

on a strange, sweet instrument which he took out of his pocket; and the musicbut there is no music like

that, unless perhaps in heaven, and that was where he brought it from, he said. It made one mad, for pleasure;

and we could not take our eyes from him, and the looks that went out of our eyes came from our hearts, and

their dumb speech was worship. He brought the dance from heaven, too, and the bliss of paradise was in it.

Presently he said he must go away on an errand. But we could not bear the thought of it, and clung to him,

and pleaded with him to stay; and that pleased him, and he said so, and said he would not go yet, but would

wait a little while and we would sit down and talk a few minutes longer; and he told us Satan was only his

real name, and he was to be known by it to us alone, but he had chosen another one to be called by in the

It sounded so odd and mean for such a being! But it was his decision, and we said nothing; his decision was

We had seen wonders this day; and my thoughts began to run on the pleasure it would be to tell them when I

"No, all these matters are a secret among us four. I do not mind your trying to tell them, if you like, but I will

It was a disappointment, but it couldn't be helped, and it cost us a sigh or two. We talked pleasantly along,

and he was always reading our thoughts and responding to them, and it seemed to me that this was the most

"No, it would be wonderful for you, but it is not wonderful for me. I am not limited like you. I am not subject

to human conditions. I can measure and understand your human weaknesses, for I have studied them; but I

have none of them. My flesh is not real, although it would seem firm to your touch; my clothes are not real; I

am a spirit. Father Peter is coming." We looked around, but did not see any one. "He is not in sight yet, but

"Won't you talk with him when he comes? He is not ignorant and dull, like us, and he would so like to talk

"Another time, yes, but not now. I must go on my errand after a little. There he is now; you can see him. Sit

We looked up and saw Father Peter approaching through the chestnuts. We three were sitting together in the

grass, and Satan sat in front of us in the path. Father Peter came slowly along with his head down, thinking,

and stopped within a couple of yards of us and took off his hat and got out his silk handkerchief, and stood

there mopping his face and looking as if he were going to speak to us, but he didn't. Presently he muttered, "I

can't think what brought me here; it seems as if I were in my study a minute agobut I suppose I have been

dreaming along for an hour and have come all this stretch without noticing; for I am not myself in these

troubled days." Then he went mumbling along to himself and walked straight through Satan, just as if nothing

were there. It made us catch our breath to see it. We had the impulse to cry out, the way you nearly always do

when a startling thing happens, but something mysteriously restrained us and we remained quiet, only

"Yes, one perceives it now," said Nikolaus, "but we are not spirits. It is plain he did not see you, but were we

It seemed almost too good to be true, that we were actually seeing these romantic and wonderful things, and

that it was not a dream. And there he sat, looking just like anybodyso natural and simple and charming,

and chatting along again the same as ever, andwell, words cannot make you understand what we felt. It

was an ecstasy; and an ecstasy is a thing that will not go into words; it feels like music, and one cannot tell

about music so that another person can get the feeling of it. He was back in the old ages once more now, and

making them live before us. He had seen so much, so much! It was just a wonder to look at him and try to

But it made you seem sorrowfully trivial, and the creature of a day, and such a short and paltry day, too. And

he didn't say anything to raise up your drooping prideno, not a word. He always spoke of men in the same

old indifferent wayjust as one speaks of bricks and manurepiles and such things; you could see that they

were of no consequence to him, one way or the other. He didn't mean to hurt us, you could see that; just as we

don't mean to insult a brick when we disparage it; a brick's emotions are nothing to us; it never occurs to us to

Once when he was bunching the most illustrious kings and conquerors and poets and prophets and pirates and

beggars togetherjust a brickpileI was shamed into putting in a word for man, and asked him why he

made so much difference between men and himself. He had to struggle with that a moment; he didn't seem to

"The difference between man and me? The difference between a mortal and an immortal? between a cloud

and a spirit?" He picked up a woodlouse that was creeping along a piece of bark: "What is the difference

I said, "One cannot compare things which by their nature and by the interval between them are not

"You have answered your own question," he said. "I will expand it. Man is made of dirtI saw him made. I

am not made of dirt. Man is a museum of diseases, a home of impurities; he comes today and is gone

tomorrow; he begins as dirt and departs as stench; I am of the aristocracy of the Imperishables. And man has

the Moral Sense. You understand? He has the Moral Sense. That would seem to be difference enough

He stopped there, as if that settled the matter. I was sorry, for at that time I had but a dim idea of what the

Moral Sense was. I merely knew that we were proud of having it, and when he talked like that about it, it

wounded me, and I felt as a girl feels who thinks her dearest finery is being admired and then overhears

strangers making fun of it. For a while we were all silent, and I, for one, was depressed. Then Satan began to

chat again, and soon he was sparkling along in such a cheerful and vivacious vein that my spirits rose once

more. He told some very cunning things that put us in a gale of laughter; and when he was telling about the

time that Samson tied the torches to the foxes' tails and set them loose in the Philistines' corn, and Samson

sitting on the fence slapping his thighs and laughing, with the tears running down his cheeks, and lost his

balance and fell off the fence, the memory of that picture got him to laughing, too, and we did have a most

"And I you. And as a proof of it I will show you something fine to see. Usually when I go I merely vanish;

He stood up, and it was quickly finished. He thinned away and thinned away until he was a soapbubble,

except that he kept his shape. You could see the bushes through him as clearly as you see things through a

soapbubble, and all over him played and flashed the delicate iridescent colors of the bubble, and along with

them was that thing shaped like a windowsash which you always see on the globe of the bubble. You have

seen a bubble strike the carpet and lightly bound along two or three times before it bursts. He did that. He

sprangtouched the grassboundedfloated alongtouched againand so on, and presently

It was a strange and beautiful thing to see. We did not say anything, but sat wondering and dreaming and

I was miserable to hear them say it, for it was the same cold fear that was in my own mind. Then we saw poor

old Father Peter wandering along back, with his head bent down, searching the ground. When he was pretty

close to us he looked up and saw us, and said, "How long have you been here, boys?"

"Then it is since I came by, and maybe you can help me. Did you come up by the path?"

"That is good. I came the same way. I have lost my wallet. There wasn't much in it, but a very little is much

We hadn't noticed it; yet there it lay, right where Satan stood when he began to meltif he did melt and it

"It is mine," he said, "but not the contents. This is fat; mine was flat; mine was light; this is heavy." He

opened it; it was stuffed as full as it could hold with gold coins. He let us gaze our fill; and of course we did

gaze, for we had never seen so much money at one time before. All our mouths came open to say "Satan did

it!" but nothing came out. There it was, you seewe couldn't tell what Satan didn't want told; he had said so

It made us laugh. And it made him laugh, too, as soon as he thought what a foolish question it was.

Our mouths came open to answer, but stood so for a moment, because we couldn't say "Nobody," for it

wouldn't be true, and the right word didn't seem to come; then I thought of the right one, and said it:

"It is not so," said Father Peter, and looked at us very severely. "I came by here a while ago, and there was no

one here, but that is nothing; some one has been here since. I don't mean to say that the person didn't pass

here before you came, and I don't mean to say you saw him, but some one did pass, that I know. On your

He began to count the money on the path, we on our knees eagerly helping to stack it in little piles.

"It's eleven hundred ducats odd!" he said. "Oh dear! if it were only mineand I need it so!" and his voice

"Noit isn't mine. Only four ducats are mine; the rest...!" He fell to dreaming, poor old soul, and caressing

some of the coins in his hands, and forgot where he was, sitting there on his heels with his old gray head bare;

it was pitiful to see. "No," he said, waking up, "it isn't mine. I can't account for it. I think some enemy... it

Nikolaus said: "Father Peter, with the exception of the astrologer you haven't a real enemy in the

villagenor Marget, either. And not even a halfenemy that's rich enough to chance eleven hundred ducats

He couldn't get around that argument, and it cheered him up. "But it isn't mine, you seeit isn't mine, in any

He said it in a wistful way, like a person that wouldn't be sorry, but glad, if anybody would contradict him.

"Bless your hearts, you do almost persuade me; you do, indeed. If I had only a hundredodd ducats of it! The

house is mortgaged for it, and we've no home for our heads if we don't pay tomorrow. And that four ducats

"It's yours, every bit of it, and you've got to take itwe are bail that it's all right. Aren't we, Theodor? Aren't

We two said yes, and Nikolaus stuffed the money back into the shabby old wallet and made the owner take it.

So he said he would use two hundred of it, for his house was good enough security for that, and would put the

rest at interest till the rightful owner came for it; and on our side we must sign a paper showing how he got

the moneya paper to show to the villagers as proof that he had not got out of his troubles dishonestly.

It made immense talk next day, when Father Peter paid Solomon Isaacs in gold and left the rest of the money

with him at interest. Also, there was a pleasant change; many people called at the house to congratulate him,

and a number of cool old friends became kind and friendly again; and, to top all, Marget was invited to a

And there was no mystery; Father Peter told the whole circumstance just as it happened, and said he could

not account for it, only it was the plain hand of Providence, so far as he could see.

One or two shook their heads and said privately it looked more like the hand of Satan; and really that seemed

a surprisingly good guess for ignorant people like that. Some came slyly buzzing around and tried to coax us

boys to come out and "tell the truth;" and promised they wouldn't ever tell, but only wanted to know for their

own satisfaction, because the whole thing was so curious. They even wanted to buy the secret, and pay

money for it; and if we could have invented something that would answerbut we couldn't; we hadn't the

We carried that secret around without any trouble, but the other one, the big one, the splendid one, burned the

very vitals of us, it was so hot to get out and we so hot to let it out and astonish people with it. But we had to

keep it in; in fact, it kept itself in. Satan said it would, and it did. We went off every day and got to ourselves

in the woods so that we could talk about Satan, and really that was the only subject we thought of or cared

anything about; and day and night we watched for him and hoped he would come, and we got more and more

impatient all the time. We hadn't any interest in the other boys any more, and wouldn't take part in their

games and enterprises. They seemed so tame, after Satan; and their doings so trifling and commonplace after

his adventures in antiquity and the constellations, and his miracles and meltings and explosions, and all that.

During the first day we were in a state of anxiety on account of one thing, and we kept going to Father Peter's

house on one pretext or another to keep track of it. That was the gold coin; we were afraid it would crumble

and turn to dust, like fairy money. If it didBut it didn't. At the end of the day no complaint had been made

about it, so after that we were satisfied that it was real gold, and dropped the anxiety out of our minds.

There was a question which we wanted to ask Father Peter, and finally we went there the second evening, a

little diffidently, after drawing straws, and I asked it as casually as I could, though it did not sound as casual

He looked down, surprised, over his great spectacles, and said, "Why, it is the faculty which enables us to

It threw some light, but not a glare, and I was a little disappointed, also to some degree embarrassed. He was

waiting for me to go on, so, in default of anything else to say, I asked, "Is it valuable?"

"Valuable? Heavens! lad, it is the one thing that lifts man above the beasts that perish and makes him heir to

This did not remind me of anything further to say, so I got out, with the other boys, and we went away with

that indefinite sense you have often had of being filled but not fatted. They wanted me to explain, but I was

We passed out through the parlor, and there was Marget at the spinnet teaching Marie Lueger. So one of the

deserting pupils was back; and an influential one, too; the others would follow. Marget jumped up and ran

and thanked us again, with tears in her eyesthis was the third timefor saving her and her uncle from

being turned into the street, and we told her again we hadn't done it; but that was her way, she never could be

grateful enough for anything a person did for her; so we let her have her say. And as we passed through the

garden, there was Wilhelm Meidling sitting there waiting, for it was getting toward the edge of the evening,

and he would be asking Marget to take a walk along the river with him when she was done with the lesson.

He was a young lawyer, and succeeding fairly well and working his way along, little by little. He was very

fond of Marget, and she of him. He had not deserted along with the others, but had stood his ground all

through. His faithfulness was not lost on Marget and her uncle. He hadn't so very much talent, but he was

handsome and good, and these are a kind of talents themselves and help along. He asked us how the lesson

was getting along, and we told him it was about done. And maybe it was so; we didn't know anything about

On the fourth day comes the astrologer from his crumbling old tower up the valley, where he had heard the

news, I reckon. He had a private talk with us, and we told him what we could, for we were mightily in dread

Then he said, as if he were talking to himself: "It is very singular. Yes... very strange. A curious

coincidence." Then he began to ask questions, and went over the whole ground from the beginning, we

answering. By and by he said: "Eleven hundred and six ducats. It is a large sum."

"Oh, seven, was it? Of course a ducat more or less isn't of consequence, but you said eleven hundred and six

It would not have been safe for us to say he was mistaken, but we knew he was. Nikolaus said, "We ask

"Oh, it is no matter, lad; it was merely that I noticed the discrepancy. It is several days, and you cannot be

expected to remember precisely. One is apt to be inexact when there is no particular circumstance to impress

"First, we all counted the piles of coin, each in turn, and all made it the sameeleven hundred and six. But I

had slipped one out, for fun, when the count began, and now I slipped it back and said, `I think there is a

mistakethere are eleven hundred and seven; let us count again.' We did, and of course I was right. They

Then he went away, leaving us very much troubled, and wondering what he could mean. In about an hour we

found out; for by that time it was all over the village that Father Peter had been arrested for stealing a great

sum of money from the astrologer. Everybody's tongue was loose and going. Many said it was not in Father

Peter's character and must be a mistake; but the others shook their heads and said misery and want could

drive a suffering man to almost anything. About one detail there were no differences; all agreed that Father

Peter's account of how the money came into his hands was just about unbelievableit had such an

impossible look. They said it might have come into the astrologer's hands in some such way, but into Father

Peter's, never! Our characters began to suffer now. We were Father Peter's only witnesses; how much did he

probably pay us to back up his fantastic tale? People talked that kind of talk to us pretty freely and frankly,

and were full of scoffings when we begged them to believe really we had told only the truth. Our parents

were harder on us than any one else. Our fathers said we were disgracing our families, and they commanded

us to purge ourselves of our lie, and there was no limit to their anger when we continued to say we had

spoken true. Our mothers cried over us and begged us to give back our bribe and get back our honest names

and save our families from shame, and come out and honorably confess. And at last we were so worried and

harassed that we tried to tell the whole thing, Satan and allbut no, it wouldn't come out. We were hoping

and longing all the time that Satan would come and help us out of our trouble, but there was no sign of him.

Within an hour after the astrologer's talk with us, Father Peter was in prison and the money sealed up and in

the hands of the officers of the law. The money was in a bag, and Solomon Isaacs said he had not touched it

since he had counted it; his oath was taken that it was the same money, and that the amount was eleven

hundred and seven ducats. Father Peter claimed trial by the ecclesiastical court, but our other priest, Father

Adolf, said an ecclesiastical court hadn't jurisdiction over a suspended priest. The bishop upheld him. That

settled it; the case would go to trial in the civil court. The court would not sit for some time to come. Wilhelm

Meidling would be Father Peter's lawyer and do the best he could, of course, but he told us privately that a

weak case on his side and all the power and prejudice on the other made the outlook bad.

So Marget's new happiness died a quick death. No friends came to condole with her, and none were expected;

an unsigned note withdrew her invitation to the party. There would be no scholars to take lessons. How could

she support herself? She could remain in the house, for the mortgage was paid off, though the government

and not poor Solomon Isaacs had the mortgagemoney in its grip for the present. Old Ursula, who was cook,

chambermaid, housekeeper, laundress, and everything else for Father Peter, and had been Marget's nurse in

earlier years, said God would provide. But she said that from habit, for she was a good Christian. She meant

We boys wanted to go and see Marget and show friendliness for her, but our parents were afraid of offending

the community and wouldn't let us. The astrologer was going around inflaming everybody against Father

Peter, and saying he was an abandoned thief and had stolen eleven hundred and seven gold ducats from him.

He said he knew he was a thief from that fact, for it was exactly the sum he had lost and which Father Peter

In the afternoon of the fourth day after the catastrophe old Ursula appeared at our house and asked for some

washing to do, and begged my mother to keep this secret, to save Marget's pride, who would stop this project

if she found it out, yet Marget had not enough to eat and was growing weak. Ursula was growing weak

herself, and showed it; and she ate of the food that was offered her like a starving person, but could not be

persuaded to carry any home, for Marget would not eat charity food. She took some clothes down to the

stream to wash them, but we saw from the window that handling the bat was too much for her strength; so

she was called back and a trifle of money offered her, which she was afraid to take lest Marget should

suspect; then she took it, saying she would explain that she found it in the road. To keep it from being a lie

and damning her soul, she got me to drop it while she watched; then she went along by there and found it,

and exclaimed with surprise and joy, and picked it up and went her way. Like the rest of the village, she

could tell everyday lies fast enough and without taking any precautions against fire and brimstone on their

account; but this was a new kind of lie, and it had a dangerous look because she hadn't had any practice in it.

After a week's practice it wouldn't have given her any trouble. It is the way we are made.

I was in trouble, for how would Marget live? Ursula could not find a coin in the road every dayperhaps not

even a second one. And I was ashamed, too, for not having been near Marget, and she so in need of friends;

I was walking along the path, feeling very downhearted, when a most cheery and tingling fresheningup

sensation went rippling through me, and I was too glad for any words, for I knew by that sign that Satan was

by. I had noticed it before. Next moment he was alongside of me and I was telling him all my trouble and

what had been happening to Marget and her uncle. While we were talking we turned a curve and saw old

Ursula resting in the shade of a tree, and she had a lean stray kitten in her lap and was petting it. I asked her

where she got it, and she said it came out of the woods and followed her; and she said it probably hadn't any

mother or any friends and she was going to take it home and take care of it. Satan said:

"I understand you are very poor. Why do you want to add another mouth to feed? Why don't you give it to

Ursula bridled at this and said: "Perhaps you would like to have it. You must be rich, with your fine clothes

and quality airs." Then she sniffed and said: "Give it to the richthe idea! The rich don't care for anybody

but themselves; it's only the poor that have feeling for the poor, and help them. The poor and God. God will

Ursula's eyes snapped with anger. "Because I know it!" she said. "Not a sparrow falls to the ground without

Old Ursula's jaws worked, but she could not get any word out for the moment, she was so horrified. When

she got her tongue, she stormed out, "Go about your business, you puppy, or I will take a stick to you!"

I could not speak, I was so scared. I knew that with his notions about the human race Satan would consider it

a matter of no consequence to strike her dead, there being "plenty more"; but my tongue stood still, I could

give her no warning. But nothing happened; Satan remained tranquiltranquil and indifferent. I suppose he

could not be insulted by Ursula any more than the king could be insulted by a tumblebug. The old woman

jumped to her feet when she made her remark, and did it as briskly as a young girl. It had been many years

since she had done the like of that. That was Satan's influence; he was a fresh breeze to the weak and the sick,

wherever he came. His presence affected even the lean kitten, and it skipped to the ground and began to chase

a leaf. This surprised Ursula, and she stood looking at the creature and nodding her head wonderingly, her

Ursula was not proposing to be friendly with the mocking stranger, and she gave him an ungentle look and

retorted: "Who asked you to come here and pester me, I'd like to know? And what do you know about what

"You haven't seen a kitten with the hairspines on its tongue pointing to the front, have you?"

Ursula was become pretty spry, but the kitten was spryer, and she could not catch it, and had to give it up.

The creature answered to the name and came. Ursula examined its tongue. "Upon my word, it's true!" she

"Because all cats of that breed are named Agnes; they will not answer to any other."

Ursula was impressed. "It is the most wonderful thing!" Then a shadow of trouble came into her face, for her

superstitions were aroused, and she reluctantly put the creature down, saying: "I suppose I must let it go; I am

not afraidno, not exactly that, though the priestwell, I've heard peopleindeed, many people... And,

besides, it is quite well now and can take care of itself." She sighed, and turned to go, murmuring: "It is such

a pretty one, too, and would be such companyand the house is so sad and lonesome these troubled days...

"Does it? Is it true? Young man, do you know it to be true? How does it bring luck?"

Ursula looked disappointed. "Money? A cat bring money? The idea! You could never sell it here; people do

"I don't mean sell it. I mean have an income from it. This kind is called the Lucky Cat. Its owner finds four

I saw the indignation rising in the old woman's face. She was insulted. This boy was making fun of her. That

was her thought. She thrust her hands into her pockets and straightened up to give him a piece of her mind.

Her temper was all up, and hot. Her mouth came open and let out three words of a bitter sentence,... then it

fell silent, and the anger in her face turned to surprise or wonder or fear, or something, and she slowly

brought out her hands from her pockets and opened them and held them so. In one was my piece of money, in

the other lay four silver groschen. She gazed a little while, perhaps to see if the groschen would vanish away;

"It's trueit's trueand I'm ashamed and beg forgiveness, O dear master and benefactor!" And she ran to

Satan and kissed his hand, over and over again, according to the Austrian custom.

In her heart she probably believed it was a witchcat and an agent of the Devil; but no matter, it was all the

more certain to be able to keep its contract and furnish a daily good living for the family, for in matters of

finance even the piousest of our peasants would have more confidence in an arrangement with the Devil than

with an archangel. Ursula started homeward, with Agnes in her arms, and I said I wished I had her privilege

Then I caught my breath, for we were there. There in the parlor, and Marget standing looking at us,

astonished. She was feeble and pale, but I knew that those conditions would not last in Satan's atmosphere,

and it turned out so. I introduced Satanthat is, Philip Traumand we sat down and talked. There was no

constraint. We were simple folk, in our village, and when a stranger was a pleasant person we were soon

friends. Marget wondered how we got in without her hearing us. Traum said the door was open, and we

walked in and waited until she should turn around and greet us. This was not true; no door was open; we

entered through the walls or the roof or down the chimney, or somehow; but no matter, what Satan wished a

person to believe, the person was sure to believe, and so Marget was quite satisfied with that explanation.

And then the main part of her mind was on Traum, anyway; she couldn't keep her eyes off him, he was so

beautiful. That gratified me, and made me proud. I hoped he would show off some, but he didn't. He seemed

only interested in being friendly and telling lies. He said he was an orphan. That made Marget pity him. The

water came into her eyes. He said he had never known his mamma; she passed away while he was a young

thing; and said his papa was in shattered health, and had no property to speak ofin fact, none of any earthly

valuebut he had an uncle in business down in the tropics, and he was very well off and had a monopoly,

and it was from this uncle that he drew his support. The very mention of a kind uncle was enough to remind

Marget of her own, and her eyes filled again. She said she hoped their two uncles would meet, some day. It

And so they went on chatting, and poor Marget forgot her sorrow for one little while, anyway. It was

probably the only really bright and cheery hour she had known lately. I saw she liked Philip, and I knew she

would. And when he told her he was studying for the ministry I could see that she liked him better than ever.

And then, when he promised to get her admitted to the jail so that she could see her uncle, that was the

capstone. He said he would give the guards a little present, and she must always go in the evening after dark,

and say nothing, "but just show this paper and pass in, and show it again when you come out"and he

scribbled some queer marks on the paper and gave it to her, and she was ever so thankful, and right away was

in a fever for the sun to go down; for in that old, cruel time prisoners were not allowed to see their friends,

and sometimes they spent years in the jails without ever seeing a friendly face. I judged that the marks on the

paper were an enchantment, and that the guards would not know what they were doing, nor have any memory

of it afterward; and that was indeed the way of it. Ursula put her head in at the door now and said:

"Supper's ready, miss." Then she saw us and looked frightened, and motioned me to come to her, which I did,

and she asked if we had told about the cat. I said no, and she was relieved, and said please don't; for if Miss

Marget knew, she would think it was an unholy cat and would send for a priest and have its gifts all purified

out of it, and then there wouldn't be any more dividends. So I said we wouldn't tell, and she was satisfied.

Then I was beginning to say goodby to Marget, but Satan interrupted and said, ever so politelywell, I

don't remember just the words, but anyway he as good as invited himself to supper, and me, too. Of course

Marget was miserably embarrassed, for she had no reason to suppose there would be half enough for a sick

bird. Ursula heard him, and she came straight into the room, not a bit pleased. At first she was astonished to

see Marget looking so fresh and rosy, and said so; then she spoke up in her native tongue, which was

Bohemian, and saidas I learned afterward"Send him away, Miss Marget; there's not victuals enough."

Before Marget could speak, Satan had the word, and was talking back to Ursula in her own languagewhich

was a surprise to her, and for her mistress, too. He said, "Didn't I see you down the road awhile ago?"

"Ah, that pleases me; I see you remember me." He stepped to her and whispered: "I told you it is a Lucky

That sponged the slate of Ursula's feelings clean of its anxieties, and a deep, financial joy shone in her eyes.

The cat's value was augmenting. It was getting full time for Marget to take some sort of notice of Satan's

invitation, and she did it in the best way, the honest way that was natural to her. She said she had little to

We had supper in the kitchen, and Ursula waited at table. A small fish was in the fryingpan, crisp and brown

and tempting, and one could see that Marget was not expecting such respectable food as this. Ursula brought

it, and Marget divided it between Satan and me, declining to take any of it herself; and was beginning to say

she did not care for fish today, but she did not finish the remark. It was because she noticed that another fish

had appeared in the pan. She looked surprised, but did not say anything. She probably meant to inquire of

Ursula about this later. There were other surprises: flesh and game and wines and fruitsthings which had

been strangers in that house lately; but Marget made no exclamations, and now even looked unsurprised,

which was Satan's influence, of course. Satan talked right along, and was entertaining, and made the time

pass pleasantly and cheerfully; and although he told a good many lies, it was no harm in him, for he was only

an angel and did not know any better. They do not know right from wrong; I knew this, because I

remembered what he had said about it. He got on the good side of Ursula. He praised her to Marget,

confidentially, but speaking just loud enough for Ursula to hear. He said she was a fine woman, and he hoped

some day to bring her and his uncle together. Very soon Ursula was mincing and simpering around in a

ridiculous girly way, and smoothing out her gown and prinking at herself like a foolish old hen, and all the

time pretending she was not hearing what Satan was saying. I was ashamed, for it showed us to be what Satan

considered us, a silly race and trivial. Satan said his uncle entertained a great deal, and to have a clever

"Yes," said Satan indifferently; "some even call him a Prince, out of compliment, but he is not bigoted; to

My hand was hanging down by my chair; Agnes came along and licked it; by this act a secret was revealed. I

started to say, "It is all a mistake; this is just a common, ordinary cat; the hairneedles on her tongue point

inward, not outward." But the words did not come, because they couldn't. Satan smiled upon me, and I

When it was dark Marget took food and wine and fruit, in a basket, and hurried away to the jail, and Satan

and I walked toward my home. I was thinking to myself that I should like to see what the inside of the jail

was like; Satan overheard the thought, and the next moment we were in the jail. We were in the

torturechamber, Satan said. The rack was there, and the other instruments, and there was a smoky lantern or

two hanging on the walls and helping to make the place look dim and dreadful. There were people

thereand executionersbut as they took no notice of us, it meant that we were invisible. A young man lay

bound, and Satan said he was suspected of being a heretic, and the executioners were about to inquire into it.

They asked the man to confess to the charge, and he said he could not, for it was not true. Then they drove

splinter after splinter under his nails, and he shrieked with the pain. Satan was not disturbed, but I could not

endure it, and had to be whisked out of there. I was faint and sick, but the fresh air revived me, and we

"No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not

deserved it," and he went on talking like that. "It is like your paltry racealways lying, always claiming

virtues which it hasn't got, always denying them to the higher animals, which alone possess them. No brute

ever does a cruel thingthat is the monopoly of those with the Moral Sense. When a brute inflicts pain he

does it innocently; it is not wrong; for him there is no such thing as wrong. And he does not inflict pain for

the pleasure of inflicting itonly man does that. Inspired by that mongrel Moral Sense of his! A sense whose

function is to distinguish between right and wrong, with liberty to choose which of them he will do. Now

what advantage can he get out of that? He is always choosing, and in nine cases out of ten he prefers the

wrong. There shouldn't be any wrong; and without the Moral Sense there couldn't be any. And yet he is such

an unreasoning creature that he is not able to perceive that the Moral Sense degrades him to the bottom layer

of animated beings and is a shameful possession. Are you feeling better? Let me show you something."

In a moment we were in a French village. We walked through a great factory of some sort, where men and

women and little children were toiling in heat and dirt and a fog of dust; and they were clothed in rags, and

drooped at their work, for they were worn and half starved, and weak and drowsy. Satan said:

"It is some more Moral Sense. The proprietors are rich, and very holy; but the wage they pay to these poor

brothers and sisters of theirs is only enough to keep them from dropping dead with hunger. The workhours

are fourteen per day, winter and summerfrom six in the morning till eight at nightlittle children and all.

And they walk to and from the pigsties which they inhabitfour miles each way, through mud and slush,

rain, snow, sleet, and storm, daily, year in and year out. They get four hours of sleep. They kennel together,

three families in a room, in unimaginable filth and stench; and disease comes, and they die off like flies. Have

they committed a crime, these mangy things? No. What have they done, that they are punished so? Nothing at

all, except getting themselves born into your foolish race. You have seen how they treat a misdoer there in the

jail; now you see how they treat the innocent and the worthy. Is your race logical? Are these illsmelling

innocents better off than that heretic? Indeed, no; his punishment is trivial compared with theirs. They broke

him on the wheel and smashed him to rags and pulp after we left, and he is dead now, and free of your

precious race; but these poor slaves herewhy, they have been dying for years, and some of them will not

escape from life for years to come. It is the Moral Sense which teaches the factory proprietors the difference

between right and wrongyou perceive the result. They think themselves better than dogs. Ah, you are such

Then he dropped all seriousness and just overstrained himself making fun of us, and deriding our pride in our

warlike deeds, our great heroes, our imperishable fames, our mighty kings, our ancient aristocracies, our

venerable historyand laughed and laughed till it was enough to make a person sick to hear him; and finally

he sobered a little and said, "But, after all, it is not all ridiculous; there is a sort of pathos about it when one

remembers how few are your days, how childish your pomps, and what shadows you are!"

Presently all things vanished suddenly from my sight, and I knew what it meant. The next moment we were

walking along in our village; and down toward the river I saw the twinkling lights of the Golden Stag. Then

It was Seppi Wohlmeyer. He had felt his blood leap and his spirits rise in a way that could mean only one

thing, and he knew Satan was near, although it was too dark to see him. He came to us, and we walked along

together, and Seppi poured out his gladness like water. It was as if he were a lover and had found his

sweetheart who had been lost. Seppi was a smart and animated boy, and had enthusiasm and expression, and

was a contrast to Nikolaus and me. He was full of the last new mystery, nowthe disappearance of Hans

Oppert, the village loafer. People were beginning to be curious about it, he said. He did not say

anxiouscurious was the right word, and strong enough. No one had seen Hans for a couple of days.

"Well, he is always clubbing his dog, which is a good dog, and his only friend, and is faithful, and loves him,

and does no one any harm; and two days ago he was at it again, just for nothingjust for pleasureand the

dog was howling and begging, and Theodor and I begged, too, but he threatened us, and struck the dog again

with all his might and knocked one of his eyes out, and he said to us, `There, I hope you are satisfied now;

that's what you have got for him by your damned meddling'and he laughed, the heartless brute." Seppi's

voice trembled with pity and anger. I guessed what Satan would say, and he said it.

"There is that misused word againthat shabby slander. Brutes do not act like that, but only men."

"No, it wasn't, Seppi; it was humanquite distinctly human. It is not pleasant to hear you libel the higher

animals by attributing to them dispositions which they are free from, and which are found nowhere but in the

human heart. None of the higher animals is tainted with the disease called the Moral Sense. Purify your

He spoke pretty sternlyfor himand I was sorry I hadn't warned Seppi to be more particular about the

word he used. I knew how he was feeling. He would not want to offend Satan; he would rather offend all his

kin. There was an uncomfortable silence, but relief soon came, for that poor dog came along now, with his

eye hanging down, and went straight to Satan, and began to moan and mutter brokenly, and Satan began to

answer in the same way, and it was plain that they were talking together in the dog language. We all sat down

in the grass, in the moonlight, for the clouds were breaking away now, and Satan took the dog's head in his

lap and put the eye back in its place, and the dog was comfortable, and he wagged his tail and licked Satan's

hand, and looked thankful and said the same; I knew he was saying it, though I did not understand the words.

"And the dog has been often to the village, begging people to go there, but he was only driven away and not

"He only wanted help for the man who had misused him, and he thought only of that, and has had no food nor

sought any. He has watched by his master two nights. What do you think of your race? Is heaven reserved for

it, and this dog ruled out, as your teachers tell you? Can your race add anything to this dog's stock of morals

and magnanimities?" He spoke to the creature, who jumped up, eager and happy, and apparently ready for

orders and impatient to execute them. "Get some men; go with the doghe will show you that carrion; and

With the last word he vanished, to our sorrow and disappointment. We got the men and Father Adolf, and we

saw the man die. Nobody cared but the dog; he mourned and grieved, and licked the dead face, and could not

be comforted. We buried him where he was, and without a coffin, for he had no money, and no friend but the

dog. If we had been an hour earlier the priest would have been in time to send that poor creature to heaven,

but now he was gone down into the awful fires, to burn forever. It seemed such a pity that in a world where

so many people have difficulty to put in their time, one little hour could not have been spared for this poor

creature who needed it so much, and to whom it would have made the difference between eternal joy and

eternal pain. It gave an appalling idea of the value of an hour, and I thought I could never waste one again

without remorse and terror. Seppi was depressed and grieved, and said it must be so much better to be a dog

and not run such awful risks. We took this one home with us and kept him for our own. Seppi had a very

good thought as we were walking along, and it cheered us up and made us feel much better. He said the dog

had forgiven the man that had wronged him so, and maybe God would accept that absolution.

There was a very dull week, now, for Satan did not come, nothing much was going on, and we boys could not

venture to go and see Marget, because the nights were moonlit and our parents might find us out if we tried.

But we came across Ursula a couple of times taking a walk in the meadows beyond the river to air the cat,

and we learned from her that things were going well. She had natty new clothes on and bore a prosperous

look. The four groschen a day were arriving without a break, but were not being spent for food and wine and

Marget was enduring her forsakenness and isolation fairly well, all things considered, and was cheerful, by

help of Wilhelm Meidling. She spent an hour or two every night in the jail with her uncle, and had fattened

him up with the cat's contributions. But she was curious to know more about Philip Traum, and hoped I

would bring him again. Ursula was curious about him herself, and asked a good many questions about his

uncle. It made the boys laugh, for I had told them the nonsense Satan had been stuffing her with. She got no

Ursula gave us a small item of information: money being plenty now, she had taken on a servant to help

about the house and run errands. She tried to tell it in a commonplace, matterofcourse way, but she was so

set up by it and so vain of it that her pride in it leaked out pretty plainly. It was beautiful to see her veiled

delight in this grandeur, poor old thing, but when we heard the name of the servant we wondered if she had

been altogether wise; for although we were young, and often thoughtless, we had fairly good perception on

some matters. This boy was Gottfried Narr, a dull, good creature, with no harm in him and nothing against

him personally; still, he was under a cloud, and properly so, for it had not been six months since a social

blight had mildewed the familyhis grandmother had been burned as a witch. When that kind of a malady is

in the blood it does not always come out with just one burning. Just now was not a good time for Ursula and

Marget to be having dealings with a member of such a family, for the witchterror had risen higher during

the past year than it had ever reached in the memory of the oldest villagers. The mere mention of a witch was

almost enough to frighten us out of our wits. This was natural enough, because of late years there were more

kinds of witches than there used to be; in old times it had been only old women, but of late years they were of

all ageseven children of eight and nine; it was getting so that anybody might turn out to be a familiar of the

Devilage and sex hadn't anything to do with it. In our little region we had tried to extirpate the witches, but

Once, in a school for girls only ten miles away, the teachers found that the back of one of the girls was all red

and inflamed, and they were greatly frightened, believing it to be the Devil's marks. The girl was scared, and

begged them not to denounce her, and said it was only fleas; but of course it would not do to let the matter

rest there. All the girls were examined, and eleven out of the fifty were badly marked, the rest less so. A

commission was appointed, but the eleven only cried for their mothers and would not confess. Then they

were shut up, each by herself, in the dark, and put on black bread and water for ten days and nights; and by

that time they were haggard and wild, and their eyes were dry and they did not cry any more, but only sat and

mumbled, and would not take the food. Then one of them confessed, and said they had often ridden through

the air on broomsticks to the witches' Sabbath, and in a bleak place high up in the mountains had danced and

drunk and caroused with several hundred other witches and the Evil One, and all had conducted themselves

in a scandalous way and had reviled the priests and blasphemed God. That is what she saidnot in narrative

form, for she was not able to remember any of the details without having them called to her mind one after

the other; but the commission did that, for they knew just what questions to ask, they being all written down

for the use of witchcommissioners two centuries before. They asked, "Did you do so and so?" and she

always said yes, and looked weary and tired, and took no interest in it. And so when the other ten heard that

this one confessed, they confessed, too, and answered yes to the questions. Then they were burned at the

stake all together, which was just and right; and everybody went from all the countryside to see it. I went, too;

but when I saw that one of them was a bonny, sweet girl I used to play with, and looked so pitiful there

chained to the stake, and her mother crying over her and devouring her with kisses and clinging around her

neck, and saying, "Oh, my God! oh, my God!" it was too dreadful, and I went away.

It was bitter cold weather when Gottfried's grandmother was burned. It was charged that she had cured bad

headaches by kneading the person's head and neck with her fingersas she saidbut really by the Devil's

help, as everybody knew. They were going to examine her, but she stopped them, and confessed straight off

that her power was from the Devil. So they appointed to burn her next morning, early, in our marketsquare.

The officer who was to prepare the fire was there first, and prepared it. She was there nextbrought by the

constables, who left her and went to fetch another witch. Her family did not come with her. They might be

reviled, maybe stoned, if the people were excited. I came, and gave her an apple. She was squatting at the

fire, warming herself and waiting; and her old lips and hands were blue with the cold. A stranger came next.

He was a traveler, passing through; and he spoke to her gently, and, seeing nobody but me there to hear, said

he was sorry for her. And he asked if what she confessed was true, and she said no. He looked surprised and

"I am old and very poor," she said, "and I work for my living. There was no way but to confess. If I hadn't

they might have set me free. That would ruin me, for no one would forget that I had been suspected of being

a witch, and so I would get no more work, and wherever I went they would set the dogs on me. In a little

while I would starve. The fire is best; it is soon over. You have been good to me, you two, and I thank you."

She snuggled closer to the fire, and put out her hands to warm them, the snowflakes descending soft and

still on her old gray head and making it white and whiter. The crowd was gathering now, and an egg came

flying and struck her in the eye, and broke and ran down her face. There was a laugh at that.

I told Satan all about the eleven girls and the old woman, once, but it did not affect him. He only said it was

the human race, and what the human race did was of no consequence. And he said he had seen it made; and it

was not made of clay; it was made of mudpart of it was, anyway. I knew what he meant by thatthe

Moral Sense. He saw the thought in my head, and it tickled him and made him laugh. Then he called a

"Therehe wouldn't drive children mad with hunger and fright and loneliness, and then burn them for

confessing to things invented for them which had never happened. And neither would he break the hearts of

innocent, poor old women and make them afraid to trust themselves among their own race; and he would not

insult them in their deathagony. For he is not besmirched with the Moral Sense, but is as the angels are, and

Lovely as he was, Satan could be cruelly offensive when he chose; and he always chose when the human race

was brought to his attention. He always turned up his nose at it, and never had a kind word for it.

Well, as I was saying, we boys doubted if it was a good time for Ursula to be hiring a member of the Narr

family. We were right. When the people found it out they were naturally indignant. And, moreover, since

Marget and Ursula hadn't enough to eat themselves, where was the money coming from to feed another

mouth? That is what they wanted to know; and in order to find out they stopped avoiding Gottfried and began

to seek his society and have sociable conversations with him. He was pleasednot thinking any harm and

not seeing the trapand so he talked innocently along, and was no discreeter than a cow.

"Money!" he said; "they've got plenty of it. They pay me two groschen a week, besides my keep. And they

live on the fat of the land, I can tell you; the prince himself can't beat their table."

This astonishing statement was conveyed by the astrologer to Father Adolf on a Sunday morning when he

He said there must be witchcraft at the bottom of it, and told the villagers to resume relations with Marget and

Ursula in a private and unostentatious way, and keep both eyes open. They were told to keep their own

counsel, and not rouse the suspicions of the household. The villagers were at first a bit reluctant to enter such

a dreadful place, but the priest said they would be under his protection while there, and no harm could come

to them, particularly if they carried a trifle of holy water along and kept their beads and crosses handy. This

satisfied them and made them willing to go; envy and malice made the baser sort even eager to go.

And so poor Marget began to have company again, and was as pleased as a cat. She was like 'most anybody

elsejust human, and happy in her prosperities and not averse from showing them off a little; and she was

humanly grateful to have the warm shoulder turned to her and be smiled upon by her friends and the village

again; for of all the hard things to bear, to be cut by your neighbors and left in contemptuous solitude is

The bars were down, and we could all go there now, and we didour parents and allday after day. The cat

began to strain herself. She provided the top of everything for those companies, and in abundanceamong

them many a dish and many a wine which they had not tasted before and which they had not even heard of

except at secondhand from the prince's servants. And the tableware was much above ordinary, too.

Marget was troubled at times, and pursued Ursula with questions to an uncomfortable degree; but Ursula

stood her ground and stuck to it that it was Providence, and said no word about the cat. Marget knew that

nothing was impossible to Providence, but she could not help having doubts that this effort was from there,

though she was afraid to say so, lest disaster come of it. Witchcraft occurred to her, but she put the thought

aside, for this was before Gottfried joined the household, and she knew Ursula was pious and a bitter hater of

witches. By the time Gottfried arrived Providence was established, unshakably intrenched, and getting all the

gratitude. The cat made no murmur, but went on composedly improving in style and prodigality by

In any community, big or little, there is always a fair proportion of people who are not malicious or unkind by

nature, and who never do unkind things except when they are overmastered by fear, or when their

selfinterest is greatly in danger, or some such matter as that. Eseldorf had its proportion of such people, and

ordinarily their good and gentle influence was felt, but these were not ordinary timeson account of the

witchdreadand so we did not seem to have any gentle and compassionate hearts left, to speak of. Every

person was frightened at the unaccountable state of things at Marget's house, not doubting that witchcraft was

at the bottom of it, and fright frenzied their reason. Naturally there were some who pitied Marget and Ursula

for the danger that was gathering about them, but naturally they did not say so; it would not have been safe.

So the others had it all their own way, and there was none to advise the ignorant girl and the foolish woman

and warn them to modify their doings. We boys wanted to warn them, but we backed down when it came to

the pinch, being afraid. We found that we were not manly enough nor brave enough to do a generous action

when there was a chance that it could get us into trouble. Neither of us confessed this poor spirit to the others,

but did as other people would have donedropped the subject and talked about something else. And I knew

we all felt mean, eating and drinking Marget's fine things along with those companies of spies, and petting

her and complimenting her with the rest, and seeing with selfreproach how foolishly happy she was, and

never saying a word to put her on her guard. And, indeed, she was happy, and as proud as a princess, and so

grateful to have friends again. And all the time these people were watching with all their eyes and reporting

But he couldn't make head or tail of the situation. There must be an enchanter somewhere on the premises,

but who was it? Marget was not seen to do any jugglery, nor was Ursula, nor yet Gottfried; and still the wines

and dainties never ran short, and a guest could not call for a thing and not get it. To produce these effects was

usual enough with witches and enchantersthat part of it was not new; but to do it without any incantations,

or even any rumblings or earthquakes or lightnings or apparitionsthat was new, novel, wholly irregular.

There was nothing in the books like this. Enchanted things were always unreal. Gold turned to dirt in an

unenchanted atmosphere, food withered away and vanished. But this test failed in the present case. The spies

brought samples: Father Adolf prayed over them, exorcised them, but it did no good; they remained sound

Father Adolf was not merely puzzled, he was also exasperated; for these evidences very nearly convinced

himprivatelythat there was no witchcraft in the matter. It did not wholly convince him, for this could be

a new kind of witchcraft. There was a way to find out as to this: if this prodigal abundance of provender was

not brought in from the outside, but produced on the premises, there was witchcraft, sure.

Marget announced a party, and invited forty people; the date for it was seven days away. This was a fine

opportunity. Marget's house stood by itself, and it could be easily watched. All the week it was watched night

and day. Marget's household went out and in as usual, but they carried nothing in their hands, and neither

they nor others brought anything to the house. This was ascertained. Evidently rations for forty people were

not being fetched. If they were furnished any sustenance it would have to be made on the premises. It was

true that Marget went out with a basket every evening, but the spies ascertained that she always brought it

The guests arrived at noon and filled the place. Father Adolf followed; also, after a little, the astrologer,

without invitation. The spies had informed him that neither at the back nor the front had any parcels been

brought in. He entered, and found the eating and drinking going on finely, and everything progressing in a

lively and festive way. He glanced around and perceived that many of the cooked delicacies and all of the

native and foreign fruits were of a perishable character, and he also recognized that these were fresh and

perfect. No apparitions, no incantations, no thunder. That settled it. This was witchcraft. And not only that,

but of a new kinda kind never dreamed of before. It was a prodigious power, an illustrious power; he

resolved to discover its secret. The announcement of it would resound throughout the world, penetrate to the

remotest lands, paralyze all the nations with amazementand carry his name with it, and make him

renowned forever. It was a wonderful piece of luck, a splendid piece of luck; the glory of it made him dizzy.

All the house made room for him; Marget politely seated him; Ursula ordered Gottfried to bring a special

The two servants brought supplies from the pantry, together with white wine and reda bottle of each. The

astrologer, who very likely had never seen such delicacies before, poured out a beaker of red wine, drank it

I was not expecting Satan, for it was more than a week since I had seen or heard of him, but now he came

inI knew it by the feel, though people were in the way and I could not see him. I heard him apologizing for

intruding; and he was going away, but Marget urged him to stay, and he thanked her and stayed. She brought

him along, introducing him to the girls, and to Meidling, and to some of the elders; and there was quite a

rustle of whispers: "It's the young stranger we hear so much about and can't get sight of, he is away so much."

"Dear, dear, but he is beautifulwhat is his name?" "Philip Traum." "Ah, it fits him!" (You see, "Traum" is

German for "Dream.") "What does he do?" "Studying for the ministry, they say." "His face is his

fortunehe'll be a cardinal some day." "Where is his home?" "Away down somewhere in the tropics, they

sayhas a rich uncle down there." And so on. He made his way at once; everybody was anxious to know

him and talk with him. Everybody noticed how cool and fresh it was, all of a sudden, and wondered at it, for

they could see that the sun was beating down the same as before, outside, and the sky was clear of clouds, but

The astrologer had drunk his second beaker; he poured out a third. He set the bottle down, and by accident

overturned it. He seized it before much was spilled, and held it up to the light, saying, "What a pityit is

royal wine." Then his face lighted with joy or triumph, or something, and he said, "Quick! Bring a bowl."

It was broughta fourquart one. He took up that twopint bottle and began to pour; went on pouring, the

red liquor gurgling and gushing into the white bowl and rising higher and higher up its sides, everybody

"Look at the bottle," he said, holding it up; "it is full yet!" I glanced at Satan, and in that moment he vanished.

Then Father Adolf rose up, flushed and excited, crossed himself, and began to thunder in his great voice,

"This house is bewitched and accursed!" People began to cry and shriek and crowd toward the door. "I

His words were cut off short. His face became red, then purple, but he could not utter another sound. Then I

saw Satan, a transparent film, melt into the astrologer's body; then the astrologer put up his hand, and

apparently in his own voice said, "Waitremain where you are." All stopped where they stood. "Bring a

funnel!" Ursula brought it, trembling and scared, and he stuck it in the bottle and took up the great bowl and

began to pour the wine back, the people gazing and dazed with astonishment, for they knew the bottle was

already full before he began. He emptied the whole of the bowl into the bottle, then smiled out over the room,

chuckled, and said, indifferently: "It is nothinganybody can do it! With my powers I can even do much

A frightened cry burst out everywhere. "Oh, my God, he is possessed!" and there was a tumultuous rush for

the door which swiftly emptied the house of all who did not belong in it except us boys and Meidling. We

boys knew the secret, and would have told it if we could, but we couldn't. We were very thankful to Satan for

Marget was pale, and crying; Meidling looked kind of petrified; Ursula the same; but Gottfried was the

worsthe couldn't stand, he was so weak and scared. For he was of a witch family, you know, and it would

be bad for him to be suspected. Agnes came loafing in, looking pious and unaware, and wanted to rub up

against Ursula and be petted, but Ursula was afraid of her and shrank away from her, but pretending she was

not meaning any incivility, for she knew very well it wouldn't answer to have strained relations with that kind

of a cat. But we boys took Agnes and petted her, for Satan would not have befriended her if he had not had a

good opinion of her, and that was indorsement enough for us. He seemed to trust anything that hadn't the

Outside, the guests, panicstricken, scattered in every direction and fled in a pitiable state of terror; and such

a tumult as they made with their running and sobbing and shrieking and shouting that soon all the village

came flocking from their houses to see what had happened, and they thronged the street and shouldered and

jostled one another in excitement and fright; and then Father Adolf appeared, and they fell apart in two walls

like the cloven Red Sea, and presently down this lane the astrologer came striding and mumbling, and where

he passed the lanes surged back in packed masses, and fell silent with awe, and their eyes stared and their

breasts heaved, and several women fainted; and when he was gone by the crowd swarmed together and

followed him at a distance, talking excitedly and asking questions and finding out the facts. Finding out the

facts and passing them on to others, with improvementsimprovements which soon enlarged the bowl of

wine to a barrel, and made the one bottle hold it all and yet remain empty to the last.

When the astrologer reached the marketsquare he went straight to a juggler, fantastically dressed, who was

keeping three brass balls in the air, and took them from him and faced around upon the approaching crowd

and said: "This poor clown is ignorant of his art. Come forward and see an expert perform."

So saying, he tossed the balls up one after another and set them whirling in a slender bright oval in the air,

and added another, then another and another, and soonno one seeing whence he got themadding,

adding, adding, the oval lengthening all the time, his hands moving so swiftly that they were just a web or a

blur and not distinguishable as hands; and such as counted said there were now a hundred balls in the air. The

spinning great oval reached up twenty feet in the air and was a shining and glinting and wonderful sight.

Then he folded his arms and told the balls to go on spinning without his helpand they did it. After a couple

of minutes he said, "There, that will do," and the oval broke and came crashing down, and the balls scattered

abroad and rolled every whither. And wherever one of them came the people fell back in dread, and no one

would touch it. It made him laugh, and he scoffed at the people and called them cowards and old women.

Then he turned and saw the tightrope, and said foolish people were daily wasting their money to see a

clumsy and ignorant varlet degrade that beautiful art; now they should see the work of a master. With that he

made a spring into the air and lit firm on his feet on the rope. Then he hopped the whole length of it back and

forth on one foot, with his hands clasped over his eyes; and next he began to throw somersaults, both

The people murmured, for the astrologer was old, and always before had been halting of movement and at

times even lame, but he was nimble enough now and went on with his antics in the liveliest manner. Finally

he sprang lightly down and walked away, and passed up the road and around the corner and disappeared.

Then that great, pale, silent, solid crowd drew a deep breath and looked into one another's faces as if they

said: "Was it real? Did you see it, or was it only Iand was I dreaming?" Then they broke into a low

murmur of talking, and fell apart in couples, and moved toward their homes, still talking in that awed way,

with faces close together and laying a hand on an arm and making other such gestures as people make when

We boys followed behind our fathers, and listened, catching all we could of what they said; and when they sat

down in our house and continued their talk they still had us for company. They were in a sad mood, for it was

certain, they said, that disaster for the village must follow this awful visitation of witches and devils. Then

my father remembered that Father Adolf had been struck dumb at the moment of his denunciation.

"They have not ventured to lay their hands upon an anointed servant of God before," he said; "and how they

could have dared it this time I cannot make out, for he wore his crucifix. Isn't it so?"

"It is serious, friends, it is very serious. Always before, we had a protection. It has failed."

The others shook, as with a sort of chill, and muttered those words over"It has failed." "God has forsaken

"It is true," said Seppi Wohlmeyer's father; "there is nowhere to look for help."

"The people will realize this," said Nikolaus's father, the judge, "and despair will take away their courage and

He sighed, and Wohlmeyer said, in a troubled voice: "The report of it all will go about the country, and our

village will be shunned as being under the displeasure of God. The Golden Stag will know hard times."

"True, neighbor," said my father; "all of us will sufferall in repute, many in estate. And, good God!"

It smote like a thunderclap, and they were like to swoon with the terror of it. Then the dread of this calamity

roused their energies, and they stopped brooding and began to consider ways to avert it. They discussed this,

that, and the other way, and talked till the afternoon was far spent, then confessed that at present they could

arrive at no decision. So they parted sorrowfully, with oppressed hearts which were filled with bodings.

While they were saying their parting words I slipped out and set my course for Marget's house to see what

was happening there. I met many people, but none of them greeted me. It ought to have been surprising, but it

was not, for they were so distraught with fear and dread that they were not in their right minds, I think; they

were white and haggard, and walked like persons in a dream, their eyes open but seeing nothing, their lips

moving but uttering nothing, and worriedly clasping and unclasping their hands without knowing it.

At Marget's it was like a funeral. She and Wilhelm sat together on the sofa, but said nothing, and not even

holding hands. Both were steeped in gloom, and Marget's eyes were red from the crying she had been doing.

"I have been begging him to go, and come no more, and so save himself alive. I cannot bear to be his

murderer. This house is bewitched, and no inmate will escape the fire. But he will not go, and he will be lost

Wilhelm said he would not go; if there was danger for her, his place was by her, and there he would remain.

Then she began to cry again, and it was all so mournful that I wished I had stayed away. There was a knock,

now, and Satan came in, fresh and cheery and beautiful, and brought that winy atmosphere of his and

changed the whole thing. He never said a word about what had been happening, nor about the awful fears

which were freezing the blood in the hearts of the community, but began to talk and rattle on about all

manner of gay and pleasant things; and next about musican artful stroke which cleared away the remnant

of Marget's depression and brought her spirits and her interests broad awake. She had not heard any one talk

so well and so knowingly on that subject before, and she was so uplifted by it and so charmed that what she

was feeling lit up her face and came out in her words; and Wilhelm noticed it and did not look as pleased as

he ought to have done. And next Satan branched off into poetry, and recited some, and did it well, and

Marget was charmed again; and again Wilhelm was not as pleased as he ought to have been, and this time

I fell asleep to pleasant music that nightthe patter of rain upon the panes and the dull growling of distant

thunder. Away in the night Satan came and roused me and said: "Come with me. Where shall we go?"

That was a grand surprise, and made me sort of drunk with vanity and gladness to think I had come so

farso much, much farther than anybody else in our village, including Bartel Sperling, who had such a great

opinion of his travels. We buzzed around over that empire for more than half an hour, and saw the whole of

it. It was wonderful, the spectacles we saw; and some were beautiful, others too horrible to think. For

instanceHowever, I may go into that by and by, and also why Satan chose China for this excursion instead

of another place; it would interrupt my tale to do it now. Finally we stopped flitting and lit.

We sat upon a mountain commanding a vast landscape of mountainrange and gorge and valley and plain

and river, with cities and villages slumbering in the sunlight, and a glimpse of blue sea on the farther verge. It

was a tranquil and dreamy picture, beautiful to the eye and restful to the spirit. If we could only make a

change like that whenever we wanted to, the world would be easier to live in than it is, for change of scene

shifts the mind's burdens to the other shoulder and banishes old, shopworn wearinesses from mind and body

We talked together, and I had the idea of trying to reform Satan and persuade him to lead a better life. I told

him about all those things he had been doing, and begged him to be more considerate and stop making people

unhappy. I said I knew he did not mean any harm, but that he ought to stop and consider the possible

consequences of a thing before launching it in that impulsive and random way of his; then he would not make

so much trouble. He was not hurt by this plain speech; he only looked amused and surprised, and said:

"What? I do random things? Indeed, I never do. I stop and consider possible consequences? Where is the

"Well, I will tell you, and you must understand if you can. You belong to a singular race. Every man is a

sufferingmachine and a happinessmachine combined. The two functions work together harmoniously, with

a fine and delicate precision, on the giveandtake principle. For every happiness turned out in the one

department the other stands ready to modify it with a sorrow or a painmaybe a dozen. In most cases the

man's life is about equally divided between happiness and unhappiness. When this is not the case the

unhappiness predominatesalways; never the other. Sometimes a man's make and disposition are such that

his miserymachine is able to do nearly all the business. Such a man goes through life almost ignorant of

what happiness is. Everything he touches, everything he does, brings a misfortune upon him. You have seen

such people? To that kind of a person life is not an advantage, is it? It is only a disaster. Sometimes for an

hour's happiness a man's machinery makes him pay years of misery. Don't you know that? It happens every

now and then. I will give you a case or two presently. Now the people of your village are nothing to

"Well, it is true that they are nothing to me. It is not possible that they should be. The difference between

"Nothing that resembles it. At a future time I will examine what man calls his mind and give you the details

of that chaos, then you will see and understand. Men have nothing in common with methere is no point of

contact; they have foolish little feelings and foolish little vanities and impertinences and ambitions; their

foolish little life is but a laugh, a sigh, and extinction; and they have no sense. Only the Moral Sense. I will

show you what I mean. Here is a red spider, not so big as a pin's head. Can you imagine an elephant being

interested in himcaring whether he is happy or isn't, or whether he is wealthy or poor, or whether his

sweetheart returns his love or not, or whether his mother is sick or well, or whether he is looked up to in

society or not, or whether his enemies will smite him or his friends desert him, or whether his hopes will

suffer blight or his political ambitions fail, or whether he shall die in the bosom of his family or neglected and

despised in a foreign land? These things can never be important to the elephant; they are nothing to him; he

cannot shrink his sympathies to the microscopic size of them. Man is to me as the red spider is to the

elephant. The elephant has nothing against the spiderhe cannot get down to that remote level; I have

nothing against man. The elephant is indifferent; I am indifferent. The elephant would not take the trouble to

do the spider an ill turn; if he took the notion he might do him a good turn, if it came in his way and cost

"The elephant lives a century, the red spider a day; in power, intellect, and dignity the one creature is

separated from the other by a distance which is simply astronomical. Yet in these, as in all qualities, man is

"Man's mind clumsily and tediously and laboriously patches little trivialities together and gets a resultsuch

as it is. My mind creates! Do you get the force of that? Creates anything it desiresand in a moment. Creates

without material. Creates fluids, solids, colorsanything, everythingout of the airy nothing which is

called Thought. A man imagines a silk thread, imagines a machine to make it, imagines a picture, then by

weeks of labor embroiders it on canvas with the thread. I think the whole thing, and in a moment it is before

"I think a poem, music, the record of a game of chessanythingand it is there. This is the immortal

mindnothing is beyond its reach. Nothing can obstruct my vision; the rocks are transparent to me, and

darkness is daylight. I do not need to open a book; I take the whole of its contents into my mind at a single

glance, through the cover; and in a million years I could not forget a single word of it, or its place in the

volume. Nothing goes on in the skull of man, bird, fish, insect, or other creature which can be hidden from

me. I pierce the learned man's brain with a single glance, and the treasures which cost him threescore years to

"Now, then, I perceive by your thoughts that you are understanding me fairly well. Let us proceed.

Circumstances might so fall out that the elephant could like the spidersupposing he can see itbut he

could not love it. His love is for his own kindfor his equals. An angel's love is sublime, adorable, divine,

beyond the imagination of maninfinitely beyond it! But it is limited to his own august order. If it fell upon

one of your race for only an instant, it would consume its object to ashes. No, we cannot love men, but we

can be harmlessly indifferent to them; we can also like them, sometimes. I like you and the boys, I like Father

"I have wrought well for the villagers, though it does not look like it on the surface. Your race never know

good fortune from ill. They are always mistaking the one for the other. It is because they cannot see into the

future. What I am doing for the villagers will bear good fruit some day; in some cases to themselves; in

others, to unborn generations of men. No one will ever know that I was the cause, but it will be none the less

true, for all that. Among you boys you have a game: you stand a row of bricks on end a few inches apart; you

push a brick, it knocks its neighbor over, the neighbor knocks over the next brickand so on till all the row

is prostrate. That is human life. A child's first act knocks over the initial brick, and the rest will follow

inexorably. If you could see into the future, as I can, you would see everything that was going to happen to

that creature; for nothing can change the order of its life after the first event has determined it. That is,

nothing will change it, because each act unfailingly begets an act, that act begets another, and so on to the

end, and the seer can look forward down the line and see just when each act is to have birth, from cradle to

"Foreordain it? No. The man's circumstances and environment order it. His first act determines the second

and all that follow after. But suppose, for argument's sake, that the man should skip one of these acts; an

apparently trifling one, for instance; suppose that it had been appointed that on a certain day, at a certain hour

and minute and second and fraction of a second he should go to the well, and he didn't go. That man's career

would change utterly, from that moment; thence to the grave it would be wholly different from the career

which his first act as a child had arranged for him. Indeed, it might be that if he had gone to the well he would

have ended his career on a throne, and that omitting to do it would set him upon a career that would lead to

beggary and a pauper's grave. For instance: if at any timesay in boyhoodColumbus had skipped the

triflingest little link in the chain of acts projected and made inevitable by his first childish act, it would have

changed his whole subsequent life, and he would have become a priest and died obscure in an Italian village,

and America would not have been discovered for two centuries afterward. I know this. To skip any one of the

billion acts in Columbus's chain would have wholly changed his life. I have examined his billion of possible

careers, and in only one of them occurs the discovery of America. You people do not suspect that all of your

acts are of one size and importance, but it is true; to snatch at an appointed fly is as big with fate for you as is

"Yes. Now, then, no man ever does drop a linkthe thing has never happened! Even when he is trying to

make up his mind as to whether he will do a thing or not, that itself is a link, an act, and has its proper place

in his chain; and when he finally decides an act, that also was the thing which he was absolutely certain to do.

You see, now, that a man will never drop a link in his chain. He cannot. If he made up his mind to try, that

project would itself be an unavoidable linka thought bound to occur to him at that precise moment, and

"No, of himself he cannot get away from the consequences of his first childish act. But I can free him."

"Oh yes, everybody does. My mother says she is so sweet and so lovely that she is not like any other child.

She says she will be the pride of the village when she grows up; and its idol, too, just as she is now."

I was glad, this time, and said, "I don't need to ask about his case; you will be sure to do generously by him."

Straight off I was building that great future of Nicky's in my imagination, and had already made a renowned

general of him and hofmeister at the court, when I noticed that Satan was waiting for me to get ready to listen

again. I was ashamed of having exposed my cheap imaginings to him, and was expecting some sarcasms, but

"Lisa's, thirtysix. But, as I told you, I shall change their lives and those ages. Two minutes and a quarter

from now Nikolaus will wake out of his sleep and find the rain blowing in. It was appointed that he should

turn over and go to sleep again. But I have appointed that he shall get up and close the window first. That

trifle will change his career entirely. He will rise in the morning two minutes later than the chain of his life

had appointed him to rise. By consequence, thenceforth nothing will ever happen to him in accordance with

the details of the old chain." He took out his watch and sat looking at it a few moments, then said: "Nikolaus

has risen to close the window. His life is changed, his new career has begun. There will be consequences."

"But for this change certain things would happen twelve days from now. For instance, Nikolaus would save

Lisa from drowning. He would arrive on the scene at exactly the right momentfour minutes past ten, the

longago appointed instant of timeand the water would be shoal, the achievement easy and certain. But he

will arrive some seconds too late, now; Lisa will have struggled into deeper water. He will do his best, but

"Oh, Satan! oh, dear Satan!" I cried, with the tears rising in my eyes, "save them! Don't let it happen. I can't

bear to lose Nikolaus, he is my loving playmate and friend; and think of Lisa's poor mother!"

I clung to him and begged and pleaded, but he was not moved. He made me sit down again, and told me I

"I have changed Nikolaus's life, and this has changed Lisa's. If I had not done this, Nikolaus would save Lisa,

then he would catch cold from his drenching; one of your race's fantastic and desolating scarlet fevers would

follow, with pathetic aftereffects; for fortysix years he would lie in his bed a paralytic log, deaf, dumb,

blind, and praying night and day for the blessed relief of death. Shall I change his life back?"

"It is best so. I could not have changed any other link in his life and done him so good a service. He had a

billion possible careers, but not one of them was worth living; they were charged full with miseries and

disasters. But for my intervention he would do his brave deed twelve days from nowa deed begun and

ended in six minutesand get for all reward those fortysix years of sorrow and suffering I told you of. It is

one of the cases I was thinking of awhile ago when I said that sometimes an act which brings the actor an

hour's happiness and selfsatisfaction is paid foror punishedby years of suffering."

I wondered what poor little Lisa's early death would save her from. He answered the thought:

"From ten years of pain and slow recovery from an accident, and then from nineteen years' pollution, shame,

depravity, crime, ending with death at the hands of the executioner. Twelve days hence she will die; her

"Father Peter's case is coming on presently. He will be acquitted, through unassailable proofs of his

"Indeed, I know it. His good name will be restored, and the rest of his life will be happy."

"His happiness will not proceed from that cause. I shall change his life that day, for his good. He will never

In my mindand modestlyI asked for particulars, but Satan paid no attention to my thought. Next, my

"In the moon," said Satan, with a fleeting sound which I believed was a chuckle. "I've got him on the cold

side of it, too. He doesn't know where he is, and is not having a pleasant time; still, it is good enough for him,

a good place for his star studies. I shall need him presently; then I shall bring him back and possess him

again. He has a long and cruel and odious life before him, but I will change that, for I have no feeling against

He had such strange notions of kindness! But angels are made so, and do not know any better. Their ways are

not like our ways; and, besides, human beings are nothing to them; they think they are only freaks. It seems

to me odd that he should put the astrologer so far away; he could have dumped him in Germany just as well,

"Far away?" said Satan. "To me no place is far away; distance does not exist for me. The sun is less than a

hundred million miles from here, and the light that is falling upon us has taken eight minutes to come; but I

can make that flight, or any other, in a fraction of time so minute that it cannot be measured by a watch. I

I held out my hand and said, "The light lies upon it; think it into a glass of wine, Satan."

"Thereyou see it is real. The villagers thought the brass balls were magic stuff and as perishable as smoke.

They were afraid to touch them. You are a curious lotyour race. But come along; I have business. I will put

you to bed." Said and done. Then he was gone; but his voice came back to me through the rain and darkness

Sleep would not come. It was not because I was proud of my travels and excited about having been around

the big world to China, and feeling contemptuous of Bartel Sperling, "the traveler," as he called himself, and

looked down upon us others because he had been to Vienna once and was the only Eseldorf boy who had

made such a journey and seen the world's wonders. At another time that would have kept me awake, but it did

not affect me now. No, my mind was filled with Nikolaus, my thoughts ran upon him only, and the good days

we had seen together at romps and frolics in the woods and the fields and the river in the long summer days,

and skating and sliding in the winter when our parents thought we were in school. And now he was going out

of this young life, and the summers and winters would come and go, and we others would rove and play as

before, but his place would be vacant; we should see him no more. Tomorrow he would not suspect, but

would be as he had always been, and it would shock me to hear him laugh, and see him do lightsome and

frivolous things, for to me he would be a corpse, with waxen hands and dull eyes, and I should see the shroud

around his face; and next day he would not suspect, nor the next, and all the time his handful of days would

be wasting swiftly away and that awful thing coming nearer and nearer, his fate closing steadily around him

and no one knowing it but Seppi and me. Twelve daysonly twelve days. It was awful to think of. I noticed

that in my thoughts I was not calling him by his familiar names, Nick and Nicky, but was speaking of him by

his full name, and reverently, as one speaks of the dead. Also, as incident after incident of our comradeship

came thronging into my mind out of the past, I noticed that they were mainly cases where I had wronged him

or hurt him, and they rebuked me and reproached me, and my heart was wrung with remorse, just as it is

when we remember our unkindnesses to friends who have passed beyond the veil, and we wish we could

have them back again, if only for a moment, so that we could go on our knees to them and say, "Have pity,

Once when we were nine years old he went a long errand of nearly two miles for the fruiterer, who gave him

a splendid big apple for reward, and he was flying home with it, almost beside himself with astonishment and

delight, and I met him, and he let me look at the apple, not thinking of treachery, and I ran off with it, eating

it as I ran, he following me and begging; and when he overtook me I offered him the core, which was all that

was left; and I laughed. Then he turned away, crying, and said he had meant to give it to his little sister. That

smote me, for she was slowly getting well of a sickness, and it would have been a proud moment for him, to

see her joy and surprise and have her caresses. But I was ashamed to say I was ashamed, and only said

something rude and mean, to pretend I did not care, and he made no reply in words, but there was a wounded

look in his face as he turned away toward his home which rose before me many times in after years, in the

night, and reproached me and made me ashamed again. It had grown dim in my mind, by and by, then it

Once at school, when we were eleven, I upset my ink and spoiled four copybooks, and was in danger of

And only last year I had cheated him in a trade, giving him a large fishhook which was partly broken

through for three small sound ones. The first fish he caught broke the hook, but he did not know I was

blamable, and he refused to take back one of the small hooks which my conscience forced me to offer him,

No, I could not sleep. These little, shabby wrongs upbraided me and tortured me, and with a pain much

sharper than one feels when the wrongs have been done to the living. Nikolaus was living, but no matter; he

was to me as one already dead. The wind was still moaning about the eaves, the rain still pattering upon the

In the morning I sought out Seppi and told him. It was down by the river. His lips moved, but he did not say

anything, he only looked dazed and stunned, and his face turned very white. He stood like that a few

moments, the tears welling into his eyes, then he turned away and I locked my arm in his and we walked

along thinking, but not speaking. We crossed the bridge and wandered through the meadows and up among

the hills and the woods, and at last the talk came and flowed freely, and it was all about Nikolaus and was a

recalling of the life we had lived with him. And every now and then Seppi said, as if to himself:

We said we must be with him all the time; we must have all of him we could; the days were precious now.

Yet we did not go to seek him. It would be like meeting the dead, and we were afraid. We did not say it, but

that was what we were feeling. And so it gave us a shock when we turned a curve and came upon Nikolaus

We couldn't speak, but there was no occasion; he was willing to talk for us all, for he had just seen Satan and

was in high spirits about it. Satan had told him about our trip to China, and he had begged Satan to take him a

journey, and Satan had promised. It was to be a far journey, and wonderful and beautiful; and Nikolaus had

begged him to take us, too, but he said no, he would take us some day, maybe, but not now. Satan would

come for him on the 13th, and Nikolaus was already counting the hours, he was so impatient.

We wandered many a mile, always following paths which had been our favorites from the days when we

were little, and always we talked about the old times. All the blitheness was with Nikolaus; we others could

not shake off our depression. Our tone toward Nikolaus was so strangely gentle and tender and yearning that

he noticed it, and was pleased; and we were constantly doing him deferential little offices of courtesy, and

saying, "Wait, let me do that for you," and that pleased him, too. I gave him seven fishhooksall I

hadand made him take them; and Seppi gave him his new knife and a hummingtop painted red and

yellowatonements for swindles practised upon him formerly, as I learned later, and probably no longer

remembered by Nikolaus now. These things touched him, and he could not have believed that we loved him

so; and his pride in it and gratefulness for it cut us to the heart, we were so undeserving of them. When we

As we walked along homeward, Seppi said, "We always prized him, but never so much as now, when we are

Next day and every day we spent all of our spare time with Nikolaus; and also added to it time which we (and

he) stole from work and other duties, and this cost the three of us some sharp scoldings, and some threats of

punishment. Every morning two of us woke with a start and a shudder, saying, as the days flew along, "Only

ten days left;" "only nine days left;" "only eight;" "only seven." Always it was narrowing. Always Nikolaus

was gay and happy, and always puzzled because we were not. He wore his invention to the bone trying to

invent ways to cheer us up, but it was only a hollow success; he could see that our jollity had no heart in it,

and that the laughs we broke into came up against some obstruction or other and suffered damage and

decayed into a sigh. He tried to find out what the matter was, so that he could help us out of our trouble or

make it lighter by sharing it with us; so we had to tell many lies to deceive him and appease him.

But the most distressing thing of all was that he was always making plans, and often they went beyond the

13th! Whenever that happened it made us groan in spirit. All his mind was fixed upon finding some way to

conquer our depression and cheer us up; and at last, when he had but three days to live, he fell upon the right

idea and was jubilant over ita boysandgirls' frolic and dance in the woods, up there where we first met

Satan, and this was to occur on the 14th. It was ghastly, for that was his funeral day. We couldn't venture to

protest; it would only have brought a "Why?" which we could not answer. He wanted us to help him invite

his guests, and we did itone can refuse nothing to a dying friend. But it was dreadful, for really we were

It was an awful eleven days; and yet, with a lifetime stretching back between today and then, they are still a

grateful memory to me, and beautiful. In effect they were days of companionship with one's sacred dead, and

I have known no comradeship that was so close or so precious. We clung to the hours and the minutes,

counting them as they wasted away, and parting with them with that pain and bereavement which a miser

feels who sees his hoard filched from him coin by coin by robbers and is helpless to prevent it.

When the evening of the last day came we stayed out too long; Seppi and I were in fault for that; we could

not bear to part with Nikolaus; so it was very late when we left him at his door. We lingered near awhile,

listening; and that happened which we were fearing. His father gave him the promised punishment, and we

heard his shrieks. But we listened only a moment, then hurried away, remorseful for this thing which we had

caused. And sorry for the father, too; our thought being, "If he only knewif he only knew!"

In the morning Nikolaus did not meet us at the appointed place, so we went to his home to see what the

"His father is out of all patience with these goingson, and will not have any more of it. Half the time when

Nick is needed he is not to be found; then it turns out that he has been gadding around with you two. His

father gave him a flogging last night. It always grieved me before, and many's the time I have begged him off

and saved him, but this time he appealed to me in vain, for I was out of patience myself."

"I wish you had saved him just this one time," I said, my voice trembling a little; "it would ease a pain in your

She was ironing at the time, and her back was partly toward me. She turned about with a startled or

I was not prepared, and didn't know anything to say; so it was awkward, for she kept looking at me; but Seppi

"Why, of course it would be pleasant to remember, for the very reason we were out so late was that Nikolaus

got to telling how good you are to him, and how he never got whipped when you were by to save him; and he

was so full of it, and we were so full of the interest of it, that none of us noticed how late it was getting."

"It is a dear, good lad, my Nick," she said. "I am sorry I let him get whipped; I will never do it again. To

thinkall the time I was sitting here last night, fretting and angry at him, he was loving me and praising me!

Dear, dear, if we could only know! Then we shouldn't ever go wrong; but we are only poor, dumb beasts

groping around and making mistakes. I shan't ever think of last night without a pang."

She was like all the rest; it seemed as if nobody could open a mouth, in these wretched days, without saying

something that made us shiver. They were "groping around," and did not know what true, sorrowfully true

"I am sorry," she answered, "but he can't. To punish him further, his father doesn't allow him to go out of the

We had a great hope! I saw it in Seppi's eyes. We thought, "If he cannot leave the house, he cannot be

"All day. It's such a pity, too; it's a beautiful day, and he is so unused to being shut up. But he is busy

planning his party, and maybe that is company for him. I do hope he isn't too lonesome."

Seppi saw that in her eye which emboldened him to ask if we might go up and help him pass his time.

"And welcome!" she said, right heartily. "Now I call that real friendship, when you might be abroad in the

fields and the woods, having a happy time. You are good boys, I'll allow that, though you don't always find

satisfactory ways of improving it. Take these cakesfor yourselvesand give him this one, from his

The first thing we noticed when we entered Nikolaus's room was the timea quarter to 10. Could that be

correct? Only such a few minutes to live! I felt a contraction at my heart. Nikolaus jumped up and gave us a

glad welcome. He was in good spirits over his plannings for his party and had not been lonesome.

"Sit down," he said, "and look at what I've been doing. And I've finished a kite that you will say is a beauty.

He had been spending his penny savings in fanciful trifles of various kinds, to go as prizes in the games, and

"Examine them at your leisure while I get mother to touch up the kite with her iron if it isn't dry enough yet."

We did not look at the things; we couldn't take any interest in anything but the clock. We sat staring at it in

silence, listening to the ticking, and every time the minutehand jumped we nodded recognitionone minute

fewer to cover in the race for life or for death. Finally Seppi drew a deep breath and said:

"Two minutes to ten. Seven minutes more and he will pass the deathpoint. Theodor, he is going to be saved!

Five minutes more. We were panting with the strain and the excitement. Another three minutes, and there

The old mother entered, bringing the kite. "Isn't it a beauty?" she said. "And, dear me, how he has slaved over

itever since daylight, I think, and only finished it awhile before you came." She stood it against the wall,

and stepped back to take a view of it. "He drew the pictures his own self, and I think they are very good. The

church isn't so very good, I'll have to admit, but look at the bridgeany one can recognize the bridge in a

minute. He asked me to bring it up.... Dear me! it's seven minutes past ten, and I"

"Yes. Just as he came downstairs little Lisa's mother came in and said the child had wandered off

somewhere, and as she was a little uneasy I told Nikolaus to never mind about his father's ordersgo and

look her up.... Why, how white you two do look! I do believe you are sick. Sit down; I'll fetch something.

She disappeared without finishing her sentence, and we hurried at once to the back window and looked

toward the river. There was a great crowd at the other end of the bridge, and people were flying toward that

"Oh, it is all overpoor Nikolaus! Why, oh, why did she let him get out of the house!"

"Come away," said Seppi, half sobbing, "come quickwe can't bear to meet her; in five minutes she will

But we were not to escape. She came upon us at the foot of the stairs, with her cordials in her hands, and

made us come in and sit down and take the medicine. Then she watched the effect, and it did not satisfy her;

so she made us wait longer, and kept upbraiding herself for giving us the unwholesome cake.

Presently the thing happened which we were dreading. There was a sound of tramping and scraping outside,

and a crowd came solemnly in, with heads uncovered, and laid the two drowned bodies on the bed.

"Oh, my God!" that poor mother cried out, and fell on her knees, and put her arms about her dead boy and

began to cover the wet face with kisses. "Oh, it was I that sent him, and I have been his death. If I had

obeyed, and kept him in the house, this would not have happened. And I am rightly punished; I was cruel to

And so she went on and on, and all the women cried, and pitied her, and tried to comfort her, but she could

not forgive herself and could not be comforted, and kept on saying if she had not sent him out he would be

It shows how foolish people are when they blame themselves for anything they have done. Satan knows, and

he said nothing happens that your first act hasn't arranged to happen and made inevitable; and so, of your own

motion you can't ever alter the scheme or do a thing that will break a link. Next we heard screams, and Frau

Brandt came wildly plowing and plunging through the crowd with her dress in disorder and hair flying loose,

and flung herself upon her dead child with moans and kisses and pleadings and endearments; and by and by

she rose up almost exhausted with her outpourings of passionate emotion, and clenched her fist and lifted it

toward the sky, and her teardrenched face grew hard and resentful, and she said:

"For nearly two weeks I have had dreams and presentiments and warnings that death was going to strike what

was most precious to me, and day and night and night and day I have groveled in the dirt before Him praying

Him to have pity on my innocent child and save it from harmand here is His answer!"

She wiped the tears from her eyes and cheeks, and stood awhile gazing down at the child and caressing its

face and its hair with her hands; then she spoke again in that bitter tone: "But in His hard heart is no

She gathered her dead child to her bosom and strode away, the crowd falling back to let her pass, and smitten

dumb by the awful words they had heard. Ah, that poor woman! It is as Satan said, we do not know good

fortune from bad, and are always mistaking the one for the other. Many a time since I have heard people pray

Both funerals took place at the same time in our little church next day. Everybody was there, including the

party guests. Satan was there, too; which was proper, for it was on account of his efforts that the funerals had

happened. Nikolaus had departed this life without absolution, and a collection was taken up for masses, to get

him out of purgatory. Only twothirds of the required money was gathered, and the parents were going to try

to borrow the rest, but Satan furnished it. He told us privately that there was no purgatory, but he had

contributed in order that Nikolaus's parents and their friends might be saved from worry and distress. We

At the graveyard the body of little Lisa was seized for debt by a carpenter to whom the mother owed fifty

groschen for work done the year before. She had never been able to pay this, and was not able now. The

carpenter took the corpse home and kept it four days in his cellar, the mother weeping and imploring about

his house all the time; then he buried it in his brother's cattleyard, without religious ceremonies. It drove the

mother wild with grief and shame, and she forsook her work and went daily about the town, cursing the

carpenter and blaspheming the laws of the emperor and the church, and it was pitiful to see. Seppi asked

Satan to interfere, but he said the carpenter and the rest were members of the human race and were acting

quite neatly for that species of animal. He would interfere if he found a horse acting in such a way, and we

must inform him when we came across that kind of horse doing that kind of human thing, so that he could

stop it. We believed this was sarcasm, for of course there wasn't any such horse.

But after a few days we found that we could not abide that poor woman's distress, so we begged Satan to

examine her several possible careers, and see if he could not change her, to her profit, to a new one. He said

the longest of her careers as they now stood gave her fortytwo years to live, and her shortest one

twentynine, and that both were charged with grief and hunger and cold and pain. The only improvement he

could make would be to enable her to skip a certain three minutes from now; and he asked us if he should do

it. This was such a short time to decide in that we went to pieces with nervous excitement, and before we

could pull ourselves together and ask for particulars he said the time would be up in a few more seconds; so

"It is done," he said; "she was going around a corner; I have turned her back; it has changed her career."

"It is happening now. She is having words with Fischer, the weaver. In his anger Fischer will straightway do

what he would not have done but for this accident. He was present when she stood over her child's body and

We could not speak; we were frozen with horror, for if we had not meddled with her career she would have

"What you are thinking is strictly humanlikethat is to say, foolish. The woman is advantaged. Die when

she might, she would go to heaven. By this prompt death she gets twentynine years more of heaven than she

A moment before we were bitterly making up our minds that we would ask no more favors of Satan for

friends of ours, for he did not seem to know any way to do a person a kindness but by killing him; but the

whole aspect of the case was changed now, and we were glad of what we had done and full of happiness in

After a little I began to feel troubled about Fischer, and asked, timidly, "Does this episode change Fischer's

"Change it? Why, certainly. And radically. If he had not met Frau Brandt awhile ago he would die next year,

thirtyfour years of age. Now he will live to be ninety, and have a pretty prosperous and comfortable life of

We felt a great joy and pride in what we had done for Fischer, and were expecting Satan to sympathize with

this feeling; but he showed no sign and this made us uneasy. We waited for him to speak, but he didn't; so, to

assuage our solicitude we had to ask him if there was any defect in Fischer's good luck. Satan considered the

"Well, the fact is, it is a delicate point. Under his several former possible lifecareers he was going to

"There, don't be so distressed. You were sincerely trying to do him a kindness; let that comfort you."

"Oh, dear, dear, that cannot comfort us. You ought to have told us what we were doing, then we wouldn't

But it made no impression on him. He had never felt a pain or a sorrow, and did not know what they were, in

any really informing way. He had no knowledge of them except theoreticallythat is to say, intellectually.

And of course that is no good. One can never get any but a loose and ignorant notion of such things except by

experience. We tried our best to make him comprehend the awful thing that had been done and how we were

compromised by it, but he couldn't seem to get hold of it. He said he did not think it important where Fischer

went to; in heaven he would not be missed, there were "plenty there." We tried to make him see that he was

missing the point entirely; that Fischer, and not other people, was the proper one to decide about the

importance of it; but it all went for nothing; he said he did not care for Fischerthere were plenty more

The next minute Fischer went by on the other side of the way, and it made us sick and faint to see him,

remembering the doom that was upon him, and we the cause of it. And how unconscious he was that anything

had happened to him! You could see by his elastic step and his alert manner that he was well satisfied with

himself for doing that hard turn for poor Frau Brandt. He kept glancing back over his shoulder expectantly.

And, sure enough, pretty soon Frau Brandt followed after, in charge of the officers and wearing jingling

chains. A mob was in her wake, jeering and shouting, "Blasphemer and heretic!" and some among them were

neighbors and friends of her happier days. Some were trying to strike her, and the officers were not taking as

"Oh, stop them, Satan!" It was out before we remembered that he could not interrupt them for a moment

without changing their whole afterlives. He puffed a little puff toward them with his lips and they began to

reel and stagger and grab at the empty air; then they broke apart and fled in every direction, shrieking, as if in

intolerable pain. He had crushed a rib of each of them with that little puff. We could not help asking if their

"Yes, entirely. Some have gained years, some have lost them. Some few will profit in various ways by the

We did not ask if we had brought poor Fischer's luck to any of them. We did not wish to know. We fully

believed in Satan's desire to do us kindnesses, but we were losing confidence in his judgment. It was at this

time that our growing anxiety to have him look over our lifecharts and suggest improvements began to fade

For a day or two the whole village was a chattering turmoil over Frau Brandt's case and over the mysterious

calamity that had overtaken the mob, and at her trial the place was crowded. She was easily convicted of her

blasphemies, for she uttered those terrible words again and said she would not take them back. When warned

that she was imperiling her life, she said they could take it in welcome, she did not want it, she would rather

live with the professional devils in perdition than with these imitators in the village. They accused her of

breaking all those ribs by witchcraft, and asked her if she was not a witch? She answered scornfully:

"No. If I had that power would any of you holy hypocrites be alive five minutes? No; I would strike you all

So they found her guilty, and she was excommunicated and cut off from the joys of heaven and doomed to

the fires of hell; then she was clothed in a coarse robe and delivered to the secular arm, and conducted to the

marketplace, the bell solemnly tolling the while. We saw her chained to the stake, and saw the first film of

blue smoke rise on the still air. Then her hard face softened, and she looked upon the packed crowd in front

"We played together once, in longagone days when we were innocent little creatures. For the sake of that, I

We went away then, and did not see the fires consume her, but we heard the shrieks, although we put our

fingers in our ears. When they ceased we knew she was in heaven, notwithstanding the excommunication;

One day, a little while after this, Satan appeared again. We were always watching out for him, for life was

never very stagnant when he was by. He came upon us at that place in the woods where we had first met him.

"Very well," he said; "would you like to see a history of the progress of the human race?its development of

So, with a thought, he turned the place into the Garden of Eden, and we saw Abel praying by his altar; then

Cain came walking toward him with his club, and did not seem to see us, and would have stepped on my foot

if I had not drawn it in. He spoke to his brother in a language which we did not understand; then he grew

violent and threatening, and we knew what was going to happen, and turned away our heads for the moment;

but we heard the crash of the blows and heard the shrieks and the groans; then there was silence, and we saw

Abel lying in his blood and gasping out his life, and Cain standing over him and looking down at him,

Then the vision vanished, and was followed by a long series of unknown wars, murders, and massacres. Next

we had the Flood, and the Ark tossing around in the stormy waters, with lofty mountains in the distance

"The progress of your race was not satisfactory. It is to have another chance now."

Next, we had Sodom and Gomorrah, and "the attempt to discover two or three respectable persons there," as

Next came the Hebraic wars, and we saw the victors massacre the survivors and their cattle, and save the

Next we had Jael; and saw her slip into the tent and drive the nail into the temple of her sleeping guest; and

we were so close that when the blood gushed out it trickled in a little, red stream to our feet, and we could

Next we had Egyptian wars, Greek wars, Roman wars, hideous drenchings of the earth with blood; and we

saw the treacheries of the Romans toward the Carthaginians, and the sickening spectacle of the massacre of

those brave people. Also we saw Caesar invade Britain"not that those barbarians had done him any harm,

but because he wanted their land, and desired to confer the blessings of civilization upon their widows and

Next, Christianity was born. Then ages of Europe passed in review before us, and we saw Christianity and

Civilization march hand in hand through those ages, "leaving famine and death and desolation in their wake,

And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other warsall over Europe, all over the world.

"Sometimes in the private interest of royal families," Satan said, "sometimes to crush a weak nation; but

never a war started by the aggressor for any clean purposethere is no such war in the history of the race."

"Now," said Satan, "you have seen your progress down to the present, and you must confess that it is

He showed us slaughters more terrible in their destruction of life, more devastating in their engines of war,

"You perceive," he said, "that you have made continual progress. Cain did his murder with a club; the

Hebrews did their murders with javelins and swords; the Greeks and Romans added protective armor and the

fine arts of military organization and generalship; the Christian has added guns and gunpowder; a few

centuries from now he will have so greatly improved the deadly effectiveness of his weapons of slaughter that

all men will confess that without Christian civilization war must have remained a poor and trifling thing to

Then he began to laugh in the most unfeeling way, and make fun of the human race, although he knew that

what he had been saying shamed us and wounded us. No one but an angel could have acted so; but suffering

More than once Seppi and I had tried in a humble and diffident way to convert him, and as he had remained

silent we had taken his silence as a sort of encouragement; necessarily, then, this talk of his was a

disappointment to us, for it showed that we had made no deep impression upon him. The thought made us

sad, and we knew then how the missionary must feel when he has been cherishing a glad hope and has seen it

blighted. We kept our grief to ourselves, knowing that this was not the time to continue our work.

Satan laughed his unkind laugh to a finish; then he said: "It is a remarkable progress. In five or six thousand

years five or six high civilizations have risen, flourished, commanded the wonder of the world, then faded out

and disappeared; and not one of them except the latest ever invented any sweeping and adequate way to kill

people. They all did their bestto kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest incident

in its historybut only the Christian civilization has scored a triumph to be proud of. Two or three centuries

from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to

school to the Christiannot to acquire his religion, but his guns. The Turk and the Chinaman will buy those

By this time his theater was at work again, and before our eyes nation after nation drifted by, during two or

three centuries, a mighty procession, an endless procession, raging, struggling, wallowing through seas of

blood, smothered in battlesmoke through which the flags glinted and the red jets from the cannon darted;

"And what does it amount to?" said Satan, with his evil chuckle. "Nothing at all. You gain nothing; you

always come out where you went in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating

itself and monotonously reperforming this dull nonsenseto what end? No wisdom can guess! Who gets a

profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel

defiled if you touched them; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for,

fight for, die for, and are not ashamed of it, but proud; whose existence is a perpetual insult to you and you

are afraid to resent it; who are mendicants supported by your alms, yet assume toward you the airs of

benefactor toward beggar; who address you in the language of master to slave, and are answered in the

language of slave to master; who are worshiped by you with your mouth, while in your heartif you have

oneyou despise yourselves for it. The first man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities which have not yet

failed in his line; it is the foundation upon which all civilizations have been built. Drink to their perpetuation!

Drink to their augmentation! Drink to" Then he saw by our faces how much we were hurt, and he cut his

sentence short and stopped chuckling, and his manner changed. He said, gently: "No, we will drink one

another's health, and let civilization go. The wine which has flown to our hands out of space by desire is

earthly, and good enough for that other toast; but throw away the glasses; we will drink this one in wine

We obeyed, and reached up and received the new cups as they descended. They were shapely and beautiful

goblets, but they were not made of any material that we were acquainted with. They seemed to be in motion,

they seemed to be alive; and certainly the colors in them were in motion. They were very brilliant and

sparkling, and of every tint, and they were never still, but flowed to and fro in rich tides which met and broke

and flashed out dainty explosions of enchanting color. I think it was most like opals washing about in waves

and flashing out their splendid fires. But there is nothing to compare the wine with. We drank it, and felt a

strange and witching ecstasy as of heaven go stealing through us, and Seppi's eyes filled and he said

He glanced furtively at Satan, and I think he hoped Satan would say, "Yes, you will be there some day," but

Satan seemed to be thinking about something else, and said nothing. This made me feel ghastly, for I knew he

had heard; nothing, spoken or unspoken, ever escaped him. Poor Seppi looked distressed, and did not finish

his remark. The goblets rose and clove their way into the sky, a triplet of radiant sundogs, and disappeared.

Why didn't they stay? It seemed a bad sign, and depressed me. Should I ever see mine again? Would Seppi

It was wonderful, the mastery Satan had over time and distance. For him they did not exist. He called them

human inventions, and said they were artificialities. We often went to the most distant parts of the globe with

him, and stayed weeks and months, and yet were gone only a fraction of a second, as a rule. You could prove

it by the clock. One day when our people were in such awful distress because the witch commission were

afraid to proceed against the astrologer and Father Peter's household, or against any, indeed, but the poor and

the friendless, they lost patience and took to witchhunting on their own score, and began to chase a born

lady who was known to have the habit of curing people by devilish arts, such as bathing them, washing them,

and nourishing them instead of bleeding them and purging them through the ministrations of a

barbersurgeon in the proper way. She came flying down, with the howling and cursing mob after her, and

tried to take refuge in houses, but the doors were shut in her face. They chased her more than half an hour, we

following to see it, and at last she was exhausted and fell, and they caught her. They dragged her to a tree and

threw a rope over the limb, and began to make a noose in it, some holding her, meantime, and she crying and

begging, and her young daughter looking on and weeping, but afraid to say or do anything.

They hanged the lady, and I threw a stone at her, although in my heart I was sorry for her; but all were

throwing stones and each was watching his neighbor, and if I had not done as the others did it would have

All that were near by turned upon him, astonished and not pleased. It was an ill time to laugh, for his free and

scoffing ways and his supernatural music had brought him under suspicion all over the town and turned many

privately against him. The big blacksmith called attention to him now, raising his voice so that all should

"What are you laughing at? Answer! Moreover, please explain to the company why you threw no stone."

"Three witnesses," said Satan: "Mueller, the blacksmith; Klein, the butcher's man; Pfeiffer, the weaver's

"Never mind whether there are others or not, and never mind about what you consider usthree's enough to

settle your matter for you. You'll prove that you threw a stone, or it shall go hard with you."

"That's so!" shouted the crowd, and surged up as closely as they could to the center of interest.

"And first you will answer that other question," cried the blacksmith, pleased with himself for being

Satan smiled and answered, pleasantly: "To see three cowards stoning a dying lady when they were so near

You could see the superstitious crowd shrink and catch their breath, under the sudden shock. The blacksmith,

"I? Everything. By profession I am a fortuneteller, and I read the hands of you threeand some

otherswhen you lifted them to stone the woman. One of you will die tomorrow week; another of you will

It made a sensation. The faces of the crowd blanched, and turned mechanically toward the clock. The butcher

and the weaver seemed smitten with an illness, but the blacksmith braced up and said, with spirit:

"It is not long to wait for prediction number one. If it fails, young master, you will not live a whole minute

No one said anything; all watched the clock in a deep stillness which was impressive. When four and a half

minutes were gone the blacksmith gave a sudden gasp and clapped his hands upon his heart, saying, "Give

me breath! Give me room!" and began to sink down. The crowd surged back, no one offering to support him,

and he fell lumbering to the ground and was dead. The people stared at him, then at Satan, then at one

It struck a kind of panic into them, and, although no one answered him, many began to violently accuse one

another, saying, "You said he didn't throw," and getting for reply, "It is a lie, and I will make you eat it!" And

so in a moment they were in a raging and noisy turmoil, and beating and banging one another; and in the

midst was the only indifferent onethe dead lady hanging from her rope, her troubles forgotten, her spirit at

So we walked away, and I was not at ease, but was saying to myself, "He told them he was laughing at them,

That made him laugh again, and he said, "Yes, I was laughing at you, because, in fear of what others might

report about you, you stoned the woman when your heart revolted at the actbut I was laughing at the

"Well, there were sixtyeight people there, and sixtytwo of them had no more desire to throw a stone than

"Oh, it's true. I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by

majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise.

Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it. The vast

majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kindhearted and shrink from inflicting pain,

but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves. Think of it!

One kindhearted creature spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally helps in iniquities which revolt

both of them. Speaking as an expert, I know that ninetynine out of a hundred of your race were strongly

against the killing of witches when that foolishness was first agitated by a handful of pious lunatics in the

long ago. And I know that even today, after ages of transmitted prejudice and silly teaching, only one

person in twenty puts any real heart into the harrying of a witch. And yet apparently everybody hates witches

and wants them killed. Some day a handful will rise up on the other side and make the most noiseperhaps

even a single daring man with a big voice and a determined front will do itand in a week all the sheep will

"Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your racethe individual's

distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye.

These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade

you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the

majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions."

I did not like to hear our race called sheep, and said I did not think they were.

"Still, it is true, lamb," said Satan. "Look at you in warwhat mutton you are, and how ridiculous!"

"There has never been a just one, never an honorable oneon the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a

million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little

handfulas usualwill shout for the war. The pulpit willwarily and cautiouslyobjectat first; the

great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and

will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it." Then the

handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech

and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout

them, and presently the antiwar audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this

curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who

in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakersas earlierbut do not dare to say so. And

now the whole nationpulpit and allwill take up the warcry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest

man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will

invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those

consciencesoothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them;

and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he

Days and days went by now, and no Satan. It was dull without him. But the astrologer, who had returned

from his excursion to the moon, went about the village, braving public opinion, and getting a stone in the

middle of his back now and then when some witchhater got a safe chance to throw it and dodge out of sight.

Meantime two influences had been working well for Marget. That Satan, who was quite indifferent to her,

had stopped going to her house after a visit or two had hurt her pride, and she had set herself the task of

banishing him from her heart. Reports of Wilhelm Meidling's dissipation brought to her from time to time by

old Ursula had touched her with remorse, jealousy of Satan being the cause of it; and so now, these two

matters working upon her together, she was getting a good profit out of the combinationher interest in

Satan was steadily cooling, her interest in Wilhelm as steadily warming. All that was needed to complete her

conversion was that Wilhelm should brace up and do something that should cause favorable talk and incline

The opportunity came now. Marget sent and asked him to defend her uncle in the approaching trial, and he

was greatly pleased, and stopped drinking and began his preparations with diligence. With more diligence

than hope, in fact, for it was not a promising case. He had many interviews in his office with Seppi and me,

and threshed out our testimony pretty thoroughly, thinking to find some valuable grains among the chaff, but

If Satan would only come! That was my constant thought. He could invent some way to win the case; for he

had said it would be won, so he necessarily knew how it could be done. But the days dragged on, and still he

did not come. Of course I did not doubt that it would be won, and that Father Peter would be happy for the

rest of his life, since Satan had said so; yet I knew I should be much more comfortable if he would come and

tell us how to manage it. It was getting high time for Father Peter to have a saving change toward happiness,

for by general report he was worn out with his imprisonment and the ignominy that was burdening him, and

At last the trial came on, and the people gathered from all around to witness it; among them many strangers

from considerable distances. Yes, everybody was there except the accused. He was too feeble in body for the

strain. But Marget was present, and keeping up her hope and her spirit the best she could. The money was

present, too. It was emptied on the table, and was handled and caressed and examined by such as were

The astrologer was put in the witnessbox. He had on his best hat and robe for the occasion.

A. I brought it home and hid it in a secret place in my observatory, intending to find the owner if I could.

A. I thought it not worth while to look further, and was minded to use the money in finishing the wing of the

foundlingasylum connected with the priory and nunnery. So I took it out of its hidingplace and counted it

A. I am sorry to have to say this, but just as I had finished and was restoring the bag to its place, I looked up

Several murmured, "That looks bad," but others answered, "Ah, but he is such a liar!"

A. No; I thought nothing of it at the time, for Father Peter often came to me unannounced to ask for a little

Marget blushed crimson at hearing her uncle falsely and impudently charged with begging, especially from

one he had always denounced as a fraud, and was going to speak, but remembered herself in time and held

A. In the end I was afraid to contribute the money to the foundlingasylum, but elected to wait yet another

year and continue my inquiries. When I heard of Father Peter's find I was glad, and no suspicion entered my

mind; when I came home a day or two later and discovered that my own money was gone I still did not

suspect until three circumstances connected with Father Peter's good fortune struck me as being singular

A. Father Peter had found his money in a pathI had found mine in a road. Father Peter's find consisted

exclusively of gold ducatsmine also. Father Peter found eleven hundred and seven ducatsI exactly the

This closed his evidence, and certainly it made a strong impression on the house; one could see that.

Wilhelm Meidling asked him some questions, then called us boys, and we told our tale. It made the people

laugh, and we were ashamed. We were feeling pretty badly, anyhow, because Wilhelm was hopeless, and

showed it. He was doing as well as he could, poor young fellow, but nothing was in his favor, and such

sympathy as there was was now plainly not with his client. It might be difficult for court and people to

believe the astrologer's story, considering his character, but it was almost impossible to believe Father Peter's.

We were already feeling badly enough, but when the astrologer's lawyer said he believed he would not ask us

any questionsfor our story was a little delicate and it would be cruel for him to put any strain upon

iteverybody tittered, and it was almost more than we could bear. Then he made a sarcastic little speech,

and got so much fun out of our tale, and it seemed so ridiculous and childish and every way impossible and

foolish, that it made everybody laugh till the tears came; and at last Marget could not keep up her courage any

Now I noticed something that braced me up. It was Satan standing alongside of Wilhelm! And there was such

a contrast!Satan looked so confident, had such a spirit in his eyes and face, and Wilhelm looked so

depressed and despondent. We two were comfortable now, and judged that he would testify and persuade the

bench and the people that black was white and white black, or any other color he wanted it. We glanced

around to see what the strangers in the house thought of him, for he was beautiful, you knowstunning, in

The lawyer was saying his last words; and while he was saying them Satan began to melt into Wilhelm. He

melted into him and disappeared; and then there was a change, when his spirit began to look out of Wilhelm's

That lawyer finished quite seriously, and with dignity. He pointed to the money, and said:

"The love of it is the root of all evil. There it lies, the ancient tempter, newly red with the shame of its latest

victorythe dishonor of a priest of God and his two poor juvenile helpers in crime. If it could but speak, let

us hope that it would be constrained to confess that of all its conquests this was the basest and the most

"From the testimony of the accuser I gather that he found this money in a road more than two years ago.

"And the money so found was never out of his hands thenceforth up to a certain definite datethe last day of

"Certainly not; but this is irregular. If you had such a witness it was your duty to give proper notice of it and

have him here to" He broke off and began to consult with the other judges. Meantime that other lawyer got

up excited and began to protest against allowing new witnesses to be brought into the case at this late stage.

"But this is not a new witness," said Wilhelm. "It has already been partly examined. I speak of the coin."

"It can say it is not the coin that the astrologer once possessed. It can say it was not in existence last

And it was so! There was the greatest excitement in the court while that lawyer and the judges were reaching

for coins and examining them and exclaiming. And everybody was full of admiration of Wilhelm's brightness

in happening to think of that neat idea. At last order was called and the court said:

"All of the coins but four are of the date of the present year. The court tenders its sincere sympathy to the

accused, and its deep regret that he, an innocent man, through an unfortunate mistake, has suffered the

So the money could speak, after all, though that lawyer thought it couldn't. The court rose, and almost

everybody came forward to shake hands with Marget and congratulate her, and then to shake with Wilhelm

and praise him; and Satan had stepped out of Wilhelm and was standing around looking on full of interest,

and people walking through him every which way, not knowing he was there. And Wilhelm could not explain

why he only thought of the date on the coins at the last moment, instead of earlier; he said it just occurred to

him, all of a sudden, like an inspiration, and he brought it right out without any hesitation, for, although he

didn't examine the coins, he seemed, somehow, to know it was true. That was honest of him, and like him;

another would have pretended he had thought of it earlier, and was keeping it back for a surprise.

He had dulled down a little now; not much, but still you could notice that he hadn't that luminous look in his

eyes that he had while Satan was in him. He nearly got it back, though, for a moment when Marget came and

praised him and thanked him and couldn't keep him from seeing how proud she was of him. The astrologer

went off dissatisfied and cursing, and Solomon Isaacs gathered up the money and carried it away. It was

Satan was gone. I judged that he had spirited himself away to the jail to tell the prisoner the news; and in this

I was right. Marget and the rest of us hurried thither at our best speed, in a great state of rejoicing.

Well, what Satan had done was this: he had appeared before that poor prisoner, exclaiming, "The trial is over,

The shock unseated the old man's reason. When we arrived, ten minutes later, he was parading pompously up

and down and delivering commands to this and that and the other constable or jailer, and calling them Grand

Chamberlain, and Prince This and Prince That, and Admiral of the Fleet, Field Marshal in Command, and all

Marget flung herself on his breast and cried, and indeed everybody was moved almost to heartbreak. He

recognized Marget, but could not understand why she should cry. He patted her on the shoulder and said:

"Don't do it, dear; remember, there are witnesses, and it is not becoming in the Crown Princess. Tell me your

troubleit shall be mended; there is nothing the Emperor cannot do." Then he looked around and saw old

Ursula with her apron to her eyes. He was puzzled at that, and said, "And what is the matter with you?"

Through her sobs she got out words explaining that she was distressed to see him"so." He reflected over

that a moment, then muttered, as if to himself: "A singular old thing, the Dowager Duchessmeans well, but

is always snuffling and never able to tell what it is about. It is because she doesn't know." His eyes fell on

Wilhelm. "Prince of India," he said, "I divine that it is you that the Crown Princess is concerned about. Her

tears shall be dried; I will no longer stand between you; she shall share your throne; and between you you

shall inherit mine. There, little lady, have I done well? You can smile nowisn't it so?"

He petted Marget and kissed her, and was so contented with himself and with everybody that he could not do

enough for us all, but began to give away kingdoms and such things right and left, and the least that any of us

got was a principality. And so at last, being persuaded to go home, he marched in imposing state; and when

the crowds along the way saw how it gratified him to be hurrahed at, they humored him to the top of his

desire, and he responded with condescending bows and gracious smiles, and often stretched out a hand and

As pitiful a sight as ever I saw. And Marget, and old Ursula crying all the way.

On my road home I came upon Satan, and reproached him with deceiving me with that lie. He was not

"Ah, you mistake; it was the truth. I said he would be happy the rest of his days, and he will, for he will

always think he is the Emperor, and his pride in it and his joy in it will endure to the end. He is now, and will

"But the method of it, Satan, the method! Couldn't you have done it without depriving him of his reason?"

"What an ass you are!" he said. "Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness

are an impossible combination? No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful

thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those. The few that imagine themselves kings or gods

are happy, the rest are no happier than the sane. Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time,

but I have been referring to the extreme cases. I have taken from this man that trumpery thing which the race

regards as a Mind; I have replaced his tin life with a silvergilt fiction; you see the resultand you criticize!

I said I would make him permanently happy, and I have done it. I have made him happy by the only means

possible to his raceand you are not satisfied!" He heaved a discouraged sigh, and said, "It seems to me that

There it was, you see. He didn't seem to know any way to do a person a favor except by killing him or

making a lunatic out of him. I apologized, as well as I could; but privately I did not think much of his

Satan was accustomed to say that our race lived a life of continuous and uninterrupted selfdeception. It

duped itself from cradle to grave with shams and delusions which it mistook for realities, and this made its

entire life a sham. Of the score of fine qualities which it imagined it had and was vain of, it really possessed

hardly one. It regarded itself as gold, and was only brass. One day when he was in this vein he mentioned a

detailthe sense of humor. I cheered up then, and took issue. I said we possessed it.

"There spoke the race!" he said; "always ready to claim what it hasn't got, and mistake its ounce of brass

filings for a ton of golddust. You have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more; a multitude of you

possess that. This multitude see the comic side of a thousand lowgrade and trivial thingsbroad

incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities, evokers of the horselaugh. The ten thousand highgrade

comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision. Will a day come when the race will

detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at themand by laughing at them destroy them? For your

race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weaponlaughter. Power, money, persuasion,

supplication, persecutionthese can lift at a colossal humbugpush it a littleweaken it a little, century by

century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can

stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave

it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage."

We were traveling at the time and stopped at a little city in India and looked on while a juggler did his tricks

before a group of natives. They were wonderful, but I knew Satan could beat that game, and I begged him to

show off a little, and he said he would. He changed himself into a native in turban and breechcloth, and very

The juggler exhibited a seed, covered it with earth in a small flowerpot, then put a rag over the pot; after a

minute the rag began to rise; in ten minutes it had risen a foot; then the rag was removed and a little tree was

exposed, with leaves upon it and ripe fruit. We ate the fruit, and it was good. But Satan said:

"You are only an apprentice; you don't know your trade. Give me the seed. I will show you." He took the

"Oh no; that is a trifle; any novice can do that. Shall I raise an orangetree from it?"

Satan put the seed in the ground, put a handful of dust on it, and said, "Rise!"

A tiny stem shot up and began to grow, and grew so fast that in five minutes it was a great tree, and we were

sitting in the shade of it. There was a murmur of wonder, then all looked up and saw a strange and pretty

sight, for the branches were heavy with fruits of many kinds and colorsoranges, grapes, bananas, peaches,

cherries, apricots, and so on. Baskets were brought, and the unlading of the tree began; and the people

crowded around Satan and kissed his hand, and praised him, calling him the prince of jugglers. The news

went about the town, and everybody came running to see the wonderand they remembered to bring

baskets, too. But the tree was equal to the occasion; it put out new fruits as fast as any were removed; baskets

were filled by the score and by the hundred, but always the supply remained undiminished. At last a foreigner

"Away from here! Clear out, you dogs; the tree is on my lands and is my property."

The natives put down their baskets and made humble obeisance. Satan made humble obeisance, too, with his

"Please let them have their pleasure for an hour, sironly that, and no longer. Afterward you may forbid

them; and you will still have more fruit than you and the state together can consume in a year."

This made the foreigner very angry, and he cried out, "Who are you, you vagabond, to tell your betters what

they may do and what they mayn't!" and he struck Satan with his cane and followed this error with a kick.

The fruits rotted on the branches, and the leaves withered and fell. The foreigner gazed at the bare limbs with

"Take good care of the tree, for its health and yours are bound together. It will never bear again, but if you

tend it well it will live long. Water its roots once in each hour every nightand do it yourself; it must not be

done by proxy, and to do it in daylight will not answer. If you fail only once in any night, the tree will die,

and you likewise. Do not go home to your own country any moreyou would not reach there; make no

business or pleasure engagements which require you to go outside your gate at nightyou cannot afford the

The foreigner was proud and wouldn't beg, but I thought he looked as if he would like to. While he stood

I was sorry for that man; sorry Satan hadn't been his customary self and killed him or made him a lunatic. It

"I would have done it but for his wife, who has not offended me. She is coming to him presently from their

native land, Portugal. She is well, but has not long to live, and has been yearning to see him and persuade him

to go back with her next year. She will die without knowing he can't leave that place."

"He? He will not trust that secret with any one; he will reflect that it could be revealed in sleep, in the hearing

"None of them understood, but he will always be afraid that some of them did. That fear will be torture to

him, for he has been a harsh master to them. In his dreams he will imagine them chopping his tree down. That

It grieved me, though not sharply, to see him take such a malicious satisfaction in his plans for this foreigner.

"He thought he didn't, but our vanishing helped. The tree, where there had been no tree beforethat helped.

The insane and uncanny variety of fruitsthe sudden witheringall these things are helps. Let him think as

he may, reason as he may, one thing is certain, he will water the tree. But between this and night he will

"He will fetch a priest to cast out the tree's devil. You are such a humorous raceand don't suspect it."

"No. He will say a juggler from Bombay created it, and that he wants the juggler's devil driven out of it, so

that it will thrive and be fruitful again. The priest's incantations will fail; then the Portuguese will give up that

"Yes, and anywhere in Europe he would burn the man, too. But in India the people are civilized, and these

things will not happen. The man will drive the priest away and take care of the tree."

I reflected a little, then said, "Satan, you have given him a hard life, I think."

We flitted from place to place around the world as we had done before, Satan showing me a hundred

wonders, most of them reflecting in some way the weakness and triviality of our race. He did this now every

few daysnot out of maliceI am sure of thatit only seemed to amuse and interest him, just as a

For as much as a year Satan continued these visits, but at last he came less often, and then for a long time he

did not come at all. This always made me lonely and melancholy. I felt that he was losing interest in our tiny

world and might at any time abandon his visits entirely. When one day he finally came to me I was

overjoyed, but only for a little while. He had come to say goodby, he told me, and for the last time. He had

investigations and undertakings in other corners of the universe, he said, that would keep him busy for a

"Yes," he said. "We have comraded long together, and it has been pleasantpleasant for both; but I must go

Then, all tranquilly and soberly, he made the strange answer, "There is no other."

A subtle influence blew upon my spirit from his, bringing with it a vague, dim, but blessed and hopeful

A gust of thankfulness rose in my breast, but a doubt checked it before it could issue in words, and I said,

I could hardly breathe for the great hope that was struggling in me. "A vision?a vi"

It was electrical. By God! I had had that very thought a thousand times in my musings!

"Nothing exists; all is a dream. Godmanthe worldthe sun, the moon, the wilderness of starsa

dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty spaceand you!"

"And you are not youyou have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no

existence; I am but a dreamyour dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized

this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you

"I am perishing alreadyI am failingI am passing away. In a little while you will be alone in shoreless

space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade foreverfor you will remain a thought, the

only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have

"Strange! that you should not have suspected years agocenturies, ages, eons, ago!for you have existed,

companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your

universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and

hysterically insanelike all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to

make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who

made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet

required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with

biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hellmouths mercy and

invented hellmouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell;

who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all;

who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead

of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites

"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure

and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaksin a word, that

they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dreammarks are all present; you should have recognized

"It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no

heaven, no hell. It is all a dreama grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a

thoughta vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty

He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.