The Mysterious Stranger

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 The Mysterious Stranger

Writings
Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Extracts From Adam’s Diary
Eve’s Diary
The Mysterious Stranger

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The Mysterious
A Romance
Stranger
1916

Mark Twain
1835–1910

信
YOGeBooks: Hollister, MO
2013:09:02:10:02:32
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 The Mysterious Stranger

Copyright
YOGeBooks by Roger L. Cole, Hollister, MO 65672
© 2010 YOGeBooks by Roger L. Cole
All rights reserved. Electronic edition published 2010

isbn: 978-1-61183-176-4 (pdf)

isbn: 978-1-61183-177-1 (epub)

www.yogebooks.com

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The Mysterious Stranger

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The Mysterious Stranger

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 Chapter 1

I t was in 1590—winter. 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 only
a boy; and I remember, too, the pleasure it gave me.
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 cloud-forms
and the reflections of drifting arks and stone-boats; 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 forest-clothed 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 far-reaching plain dotted with little
homesteads nested among orchards and shade trees.

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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
orgy.
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 zealous
and strenuous priest, much considered.
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 that
something fearful might happen.
Father Adolf had actually met Satan face to face more than
once, and defied him. This was known to be so. Father Adolf
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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 impress the bishop, of course.
But Father Peter took no stock in the astrologer. He
denounced him openly as a charlatan—a 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
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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, had his flock.
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 Meidling—and 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 to-morrow he would foreclose.

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 Chapter 2

T hree 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
on—Nikolaus 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 third—Theodor Fischer, son of the church organist,
who was also leader of the village musicians, teacher of the
violin, composer, tax-collector 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 leisure—at least, when we
were not swimming or boating or fishing, or playing on the ice
or sliding down hill.
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
castle—Felix 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,
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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 cloud-rack. 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 softly with its wings and so
keeping them drowsy till they die.
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 angels—actual
angels out of heaven—and 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 gloomy and melancholy, like ghosts.
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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 hill-top 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, because we had been heedless and left our flint and
steel behind.
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:
“Fire? Oh, that is easy; I will furnish it.”
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

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be stronger than our fear, and we ventured back—but slowly,
and ready to fly at any alarm.
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 him—like
other things—other curious things.
“What ones?”
“Oh, a number; I don’t know how many.”
“Will you let us see you do them?”
“Do—please!” the others said.
“You won’t run away again?”
“No—indeed we won’t. Please do. Won’t you?”
“Yes, with pleasure; but you mustn’t forget your promise, you
know.”
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
all spoke at once;
“Orange!”
“Apple!”
“Grapes!”
“They are in your pockets,” he said, and it was true. And they
were of the best, too, and we ate them and wished we had more,
though none of us said so.
“You will find them where those came from,” he said, “and
everything else your appetites call for; and you need not name
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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, nuts—whatever 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 clay and set them free, and
they flew away, singing.
At last I made bold to ask him to tell us who he was.
“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 work-women have always done,
and the men laying the courses of masonry—five 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
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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 idiot
to step backward like that and not notice what she is about.”
It caught us suddenly, that name did, and our work dropped
out of our hands and broke to pieces—a cannon, a halberdier,
and a horse. Satan laughed, and asked what was the matter. I
said, “Nothing, only it seemed a strange name for an angel.” He
asked why.
“Because it’s—it’s—well, it’s his name, you know.”
“Yes—he is my uncle.”
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 remember?—he was
an angel himself, once.”
“Yes—it’s true,” said Seppi; “I didn’t think of that.”
“Before the Fall he was blameless.”
“Yes,” said Nikolaus, “he was without sin.”
“It is a good family—ours,” said Satan; “there is not a better.
He is the only member of it that has ever sinned.”
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
question—I had it on my tongue’s end and could hardly hold
it back—but I was ashamed to ask it; it might be a rudeness.
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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 lineage—to use a human
phrase—yes, from that time until the Fall, eight thousand years,
measured as you count time.”
“Eight—thousand!”
“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 old—counting 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 life-and-death 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 disposition to do it, for we do not know what it is.”
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 committed—for 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
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beautiful and gracious, and had honestly believed he was an
angel; and to have him do this cruel thing—ah, 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 down—a 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 our duty
to tell, and let the law take its course.
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.
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 Chapter 3

T he 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 anguish—why,
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 doings—even their grandest
and sublimest—we 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
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conceited, and so diseased and rickety, and such a shabby, poor,
worthless lot all around. He said it in a quite matter-of-course
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 is done. Do you
like it?”
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 other, if
we needed them.
A small storm-cloud 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
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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 could not keep from crying.
“Don’t cry,” Satan said; “they were of no value.”
“But they are gone to hell!”
“Oh, it is no matter; we can make plenty more.”
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 music—but 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
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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
presence of others; just a common one, such as people have—
Philip Traum.
It sounded so odd and mean for such a being! But it was his
decision, and we said nothing; his decision was sufficient.
We had seen wonders this day; and my thoughts began to
run on the pleasure it would be to tell them when I got home,
but he noticed those thoughts, and said:
“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 protect your
tongues, and nothing of the secret will escape from them.”
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 wonderful of all the things he did,
but he interrupted my musings and said:
“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 you will see him presently.”
“Do you know him, Satan?”
“No.”
“Won’t you talk with him when he comes? He is not ignorant
and dull, like us, and he would so like to talk with you. Will you?”
“Another time, yes, but not now. I must go on my errand after
a little. There he is now; you can see him. Sit still, and don’t say
anything.”
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
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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 ago—but 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 breathing fast. Then
the trees hid Father Peter after a little, and Satan said:
“It is as I told you—I am only a spirit.”
“Yes, one perceives it now,” said Nikolaus, “but we are not
spirits. It is plain he did not see you, but were we invisible, too?
He looked at us, but he didn’t seem to see us.”
“No, none of us was visible to him, for I wished it so.”
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 anybody—so
natural and simple and charming, and chatting along again the
same as ever, and—well, 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 think how it must seem to have such
experience behind one.
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 pride—no, not a word.
He always spoke of men in the same old indifferent way—just
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 The Mysterious Stranger
as one speaks of bricks and manure-piles 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 think
whether it has any or not.
Once when he was bunching the most illustrious kings and
conquerors and poets and prophets and pirates and beggars
together—just a brick-pile—I 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 understand how I could ask such a
strange question. Then he said:
“The difference between man and me? The difference
between a mortal and an immortal? between a cloud and a
spirit?” He picked up a wood-louse that was creeping along a
piece of bark: “What is the difference between Caesar and this?”
I said, “One cannot compare things which by their nature
and by the interval between them are not comparable.”
“You have answered your own question,” he said. “I will expand
it. Man is made of dirt—I saw him made. I am not made of dirt.
Man is a museum of diseases, a home of impurities; he comes
to-day and is gone to-morrow; 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 between us, all by
itself.”
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
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 Mark Twain
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 lovely and jolly time. By
and by he said:
“I am going on my errand now.”
“Don’t!” we all said. “Don’t go; stay with us. You won’t come
back.”
“Yes, I will; I give you my word.”
“When? To-night? Say when.”
“It won’t be long. You will see.”
“We like you.”
“And I you. And as a proof of it I will show you something fine
to see. Usually when I go I merely vanish; but now I will dissolve
myself and let you see me do it.”
He stood up, and it was quickly finished. He thinned away
and thinned away until he was a soap-bubble, except that he
kept his shape. You could see the bushes through him as clearly
as you see things through a soap-bubble, and all over him
played and flashed the delicate iridescent colors of the bubble,
and along with them was that thing shaped like a window-sash
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 sprang—touched the
grass—bounded—floated along—touched again—and so on,
and presently exploded—puff! and in his place was vacancy.
It was a strange and beautiful thing to see. We did not say
anything, but sat wondering and dreaming and blinking; and
finally Seppi roused up and said, mournfully sighing:
“I suppose none of it has happened.”
Nikolaus sighed and said about the same.
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 The Mysterious Stranger
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?”
“A little while, Father.”
“Then it is since I came by, and maybe you can help me. Did
you come up by the path?”
“Yes, Father.”
“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 to me, for it
was all I had. I suppose you haven’t seen anything of it?”
“No, Father, but we will help you hunt.”
“It is what I was going to ask you. Why, here it is!”
We hadn’t noticed it; yet there it lay, right where Satan stood
when he began to melt—if he did melt and it wasn’t a delusion.
Father Peter picked it up and looked very much surprised.
“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 see—we couldn’t tell
what Satan didn’t want told; he had said so himself.
“Boys, did you do this?”
It made us laugh. And it made him laugh, too, as soon as he
thought what a foolish question it was.
“Who has been here?”
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:
“Not a human being.”
“That is so,” said the others, and let their mouths go shut.

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 Mark Twain
“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 honor—you saw no one?”
“Not a human being.”
“That is sufficient; I know you are telling me the truth.”
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 mine—and I need it so!” and his voice broke and his lips
quivered.
“It is yours, sir!” we all cried out at once, “every heller!”
“No—it 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 must be a trap.”
Nikolaus said: “Father Peter, with the exception of the
astrologer you haven’t a real enemy in the village—nor Marget,
either. And not even a half-enemy that’s rich enough to chance
eleven hundred ducats to do you a mean turn. I’ll ask you if
that’s so or not?”
He couldn’t get around that argument, and it cheered him
up. “But it isn’t mine, you see—it isn’t mine, in any case.”
He said it in a wistful way, like a person that wouldn’t be
sorry, but glad, if anybody would contradict him.
“It is yours, Father Peter, and we are witness to it. Aren’t we,
boys?”
“Yes, we are—and we’ll stand by it, too.”
“Bless your hearts, you do almost persuade me; you do,
indeed. If I had only a hundred-odd ducats of it! The house is

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 The Mysterious Stranger
mortgaged for it, and we’ve no home for our heads if we don’t
pay to-morrow. And that four ducats is all we’ve got in the—“
“It’s yours, every bit of it, and you’ve got to take it—we are
bail that it’s all right. Aren’t we, Theodor? Aren’t we, Seppi?”
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 money—a paper to show to
the villagers as proof that he had not got out of his troubles
dishonestly.

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 Chapter 4

I t 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 party.
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 answer—but we couldn’t; we hadn’t the ingenuity, so we
had to let the chance go by, and it was a pity.
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
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 The Mysterious Stranger
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 did—But 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 as I wanted, because I didn’t know
how:
“What is the Moral Sense, sir?”
He looked down, surprised, over his great spectacles, and
said, “Why, it is the faculty which enables us to distinguish good
from evil.”
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 immortality!”
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
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 Mark Twain
sense you have often had of being filled but not fatted. They
wanted me to explain, but I was tired.
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 eyes—this was the third time—for 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 it, but
we judged it would please him, and it did, and didn’t cost us
anything.

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The Mysterious Stranger

28
 Chapter 5

O n 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 of
him. He sat there studying and studying awhile to himself; then
he asked:
“How many ducats did you say?”
“Eleven hundred and seven, sir.”
Then he said, as if he were talking to himself: “It is ver-y
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.”
“Seven,” said Seppi, correcting him.
“Oh, seven, was it? Of course a ducat more or less isn’t of
consequence, but you said eleven hundred and six before.”
It would not have been safe for us to say he was mistaken,
but we knew he was. Nikolaus said, “We ask pardon for the
mistake, but we meant to say seven.”
“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 the count upon the
memory.”
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 The Mysterious Stranger
“But there was one, sir,” said Seppi, eagerly.
“What was it, my son?” asked the astrologer, indifferently.
“First, we all counted the piles of coin, each in turn, and all
made it the same—eleven 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 mistake—there are eleven
hundred and seven; let us count again.’ We did, and of course I
was right. They were astonished; then I told how it came about.”
The astrologer asked us if this was so, and we said it was.
“That settles it,” he said. “I know the thief now. Lads, the
money was stolen.”
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
unbelievable—it 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
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 Mark Twain
we were so worried and harassed that we tried to tell the whole
thing, Satan and all—but 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 mortgage-money 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 to help in the
providing, to make sure, if she could find a way.
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
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 The Mysterious Stranger
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 pretended he had “found.”
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 every-day 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 day—perhaps not even a second
one. And I was ashamed, too, for not having been near Marget,
and she so in need of friends; but that was my parents’ fault,
not mine, and I couldn’t help it.
I was walking along the path, feeling very down-hearted,
when a most cheery and tingling freshening-up 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.
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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 some rich
person?”
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 rich—the 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 provide for this kitten.”
“What makes you think so?”
Ursula’s eyes snapped with anger. “Because I know it!” she
said. “Not a sparrow falls to the ground without His seeing it.”
“But it falls, just the same. What good is seeing it fall?”
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 tranquil—tranquil and indifferent. I
suppose he could not be insulted by Ursula any more than the
king could be insulted by a tumble-bug. 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
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 The Mysterious Stranger
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 anger quite
forgotten.
“What’s come over it?” she said. “Awhile ago it could hardly
walk.”
“You have not seen a kitten of that breed before,” said Satan.
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 I’ve seen and what I haven’t
seen?”
“You haven’t seen a kitten with the hair-spines on its tongue
pointing to the front, have you?”
“No—nor you, either.”
“Well, examine this one and see.”
Ursula was become pretty spry, but the kitten was spryer,
and she could not catch it, and had to give it up. Then Satan
said:
“Give it a name, and maybe it will come.”
Ursula tried several names, but the kitten was not interested.
“Call it Agnes. Try that.”
The creature answered to the name and came. Ursula
examined its tongue. “Upon my word, it’s true!” she said. “I have
not seen this kind of a cat before. Is it yours?”
“No.”
“Then how did you know its name so pat?”
“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 afraid—no, not exactly that,
though the priest—well, I’ve heard people—indeed, many
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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 company—and the house
is so sad and lonesome these troubled days... Miss Marget so
mournful and just a shadow, and the old master shut up in jail.”
“It seems a pity not to keep it,” said Satan.
Ursula turned quickly—just as if she were hoping some one
would encourage her.
“Why?” she asked, wistfully.
“Because this breed brings luck.”
“Does it? Is it true? Young man, do you know it to be true?
How does it bring luck?”
“Well, it brings money, anyway.”
Ursula looked disappointed. “Money? A cat bring money?
The idea! You could never sell it here; people do not buy cats
here; one can’t even give them away.” She turned to go.
“I don’t mean sell it. I mean have an income from it. This kind
is called the Lucky Cat. Its owner finds four silver groschen in
his pocket every morning.”
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; then she said, fervently:
“It’s true—it’s true—and 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 witch-cat and an
agent of the Devil; but no matter, it was all the more certain to
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 The Mysterious Stranger
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
of seeing Marget.
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
Satan—that is, Philip Traum—and 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
of—in fact, none of any earthly value—but 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 made me shudder. Philip
said he hoped so, too; and that made me shudder again.
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 Mark Twain
“Maybe they will,” said Marget. “Does your uncle travel much?”
“Oh yes, he goes all about; he has business everywhere.”
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 good-by to Marget, but Satan interrupted
and said, ever so politely—well, 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
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 The Mysterious Stranger
looking so fresh and rosy, and said so; then she spoke up in
her native tongue, which was Bohemian, and said—as 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 language—which was a
surprise to her, and for her mistress, too. He said, “Didn’t I see
you down the road awhile ago?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ah, that pleases me; I see you remember me.” He stepped
to her and whispered: “I told you it is a Lucky Cat. Don’t be
troubled; it will provide.”
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
offer, but that we were welcome if we would share it with her.
We had supper in the kitchen, and Ursula waited at table. A
small fish was in the frying-pan, 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 to-day, 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 fruits—things 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;
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 Mark Twain
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 woman presiding over the festivities
would double the attractions of the place.
“But your uncle is a gentleman, isn’t he?” asked Marget.
“Yes,” said Satan indifferently; “some even call him a Prince,
out of compliment, but he is not bigoted; to him personal
merit is everything, rank nothing.”
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 hair-
needles on her tongue point inward, not outward.” But the
words did not come, because they couldn’t. Satan smiled upon
me, and I understood.
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
torture-chamber, 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 there—and executioners—but 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
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 The Mysterious Stranger
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 walked
toward my home. I said it was a brutal thing.
“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 race—always
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 thing—that 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 it—only 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.”

40
 Chapter 6

I n 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 work-hours are fourteen per day, winter
and summer—from six in the morning till eight at night—little
children and all. And they walk to and from the pigsties which
they inhabit—four 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 ill-smelling 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
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 The Mysterious Stranger
your precious race; but these poor slaves here—why, 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 wrong—
you perceive the result. They think themselves better than dogs.
Ah, you are such an illogical, unreasoning race! And paltry—oh,
unspeakably!”
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 history—and 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 in the dark I heard a joyful cry:
“He’s come again!”
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, now—the disappearance of Hans Oppert, the village
loafer. People were beginning to be curious about it, he said. He
did not say anxious—curious was the right word, and strong
enough. No one had seen Hans for a couple of days.
“Not since he did that brutal thing, you know,” he said.
“What brutal thing?” It was Satan that asked.
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 Mark Twain
“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 nothing—
just for pleasure—and 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 again—that shabby slander.
Brutes do not act like that, but only men.”
“Well, it was inhuman, anyway.”
“No, it wasn’t, Seppi; it was human—quite 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 language, Seppi; drop those lying phrases out
of it.”
He spoke pretty sternly—for him—and 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.
Then the two talked together a bit, and Satan said:
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“He says his master was drunk.”
“Yes, he was,” said we.
“And an hour later he fell over the precipice there beyond the
Cliff Pasture.”
“We know the place; it is three miles from here.”
“And the dog has been often to the village, begging people to
go there, but he was only driven away and not listened to.”
We remembered it, but hadn’t understood what he wanted.
“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 dog—he will show you that carrion; and take a priest along
to arrange about insurance, for death is near.”
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
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 Mark Twain
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 such things—
the cat attended to all that.
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 satisfaction out of us,
our tongues being tied.
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, matter-
of-course 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
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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 family—his 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 witch-terror
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 ages—even children
of eight and nine; it was getting so that anybody might turn out
to be a familiar of the Devil—age and sex hadn’t anything to do
with it. In our little region we had tried to extirpate the witches,
but the more of them we burned the more of the breed rose
up in their places.
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,
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and all had conducted themselves in a scandalous way and
had reviled the priests and blasphemed God. That is what she
said—not 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 witch-commissioners 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 fingers—as
she said—but 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 market-
square. The officer who was to prepare the fire was there first,
and prepared it. She was there next—brought 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
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 The Mysterious Stranger
no. He looked surprised and still more sorry then, and asked
her:
“Then why did you confess?”
“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 snow-flakes 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 mud—part of it was, anyway. I knew what he meant by
that—the Moral Sense. He saw the thought in my head, and it
tickled him and made him laugh. Then he called a bullock out
of a pasture and petted it and talked with it, and said:
“There—he 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 death-agony. For he
is not besmirched with the Moral Sense, but is as the angels are,
and knows no wrong, and never does it.”
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.
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 Mark Twain
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
pleased—not thinking any harm and not seeing the trap—and
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 was returning
from mass. He was deeply moved, and said:
“This must be looked into.”
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 else—just
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,

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 The Mysterious Stranger
to be cut by your neighbors and left in contemptuous solitude
is maybe the hardest.
The bars were down, and we could all go there now, and we
did—our parents and all—day after day. The cat began to strain
herself. She provided the top of everything for those companies,
and in abundance—among them many a dish and many a wine
which they had not tasted before and which they had not even
heard of except at second-hand 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 experience.
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 self-interest 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 times—on account of the witch-dread—
and 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
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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 done—dropped
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 self-reproach 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 all they saw to
Father Adolf.
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 enchanters—that
part of it was not new; but to do it without any incantations,
or even any rumblings or earthquakes or lightnings or
apparitions—that 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 and real, they yielded to natural decay only, and took the
usual time to do it.

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 The Mysterious Stranger
Father Adolf was not merely puzzled, he was also exasperated;
for these evidences very nearly convinced him—privately—
that 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.

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 Chapter 7

M arget 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
back empty.
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 kind—a kind never dreamed
of before. It was a prodigious power, an illustrious power; he
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resolved to discover its secret. The announcement of it would
resound throughout the world, penetrate to the remotest lands,
paralyze all the nations with amazement—and 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 table for him.
Then she decked it and furnished it, and asked for his orders.
“Bring me what you will,” he said.
The two servants brought supplies from the pantry, together
with white wine and red—a bottle of each. The astrologer, who
very likely had never seen such delicacies before, poured out a
beaker of red wine, drank it off, poured another, then began to
eat with a grand appetite.
I was not expecting Satan, for it was more than a week since
I had seen or heard of him, but now he came in—I 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 beautiful—what 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 fortune—
he’ll be a cardinal some day.” “Where is his home?” “Away down
somewhere in the tropics, they say—has 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 no one
guessed the reason, of course.
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 Mark Twain
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 pity—it is royal wine.” Then his face lighted with
joy or triumph, or something, and he said, “Quick! Bring a bowl.”
It was brought—a four-quart one. He took up that two-pint
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 staring and holding their breath—
and presently the bowl was full to the brim.
“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 summon this detected household to—“
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, “Wait—remain 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 nothing—anybody can do it! With my powers I can even
do much more.”
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

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thankful to Satan for furnishing that good help at the needful
time.
Marget was pale, and crying; Meidling looked kind of
petrified; Ursula the same; but Gottfried was the worst—he
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 Moral Sense.
Outside, the guests, panic-stricken, 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
improvements—improvements 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 market-square he went
straight to a juggler, fantastically dressed, who was keeping
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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 soon—no one seeing
whence he got them—adding, 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 help—
and 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 tight-rope, 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 backward and forward, and
threw twenty-seven.
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:
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“Was it real? Did you see it, or was it only I—and 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 they
have been deeply impressed by something.
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?”
“Yes,” said the others, “we saw it.”
“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 us.”
“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 their energies. We
have indeed fallen upon evil times.”
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 suffer—all in
repute, many in estate. And, good God!—“
“What is it?”
“That can come—to finish us!”
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“Name it—um Gottes Willen!”
“The Interdict!”
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. She said:
“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 with the rest.”
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
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talk and rattle on about all manner of gay and pleasant things;
and next about music—an 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 Marget
noticed it and was remorseful.
I fell asleep to pleasant music that night—the 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?”
“Anywhere—so it is with you.”
Then there was a fierce glare of sunlight, and he said, “This is
China.”
That was a grand surprise, and made me sort of drunk with
vanity and gladness to think I had come so far—so 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 instance—However,
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
mountain-range 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
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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, shop-
worn wearinesses from mind and body both.
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 need? I know
what the consequences are going to be—always.”
“Oh, Satan, then how could you do these things?”
“Well, I will tell you, and you must understand if you can. You
belong to a singular race. Every man is a suffering-machine
and a happiness-machine combined. The two functions work
together harmoniously, with a fine and delicate precision, on
the give-and-take principle. For every happiness turned out in
the one department the other stands ready to modify it with a
sorrow or a pain—maybe 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 predominates—
always; never the other. Sometimes a man’s make and disposition
are such that his misery-machine 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

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people of your village are nothing to me—you know that, don’t
you?”
I did not like to speak out too flatly, so I said I had suspected
it.
“Well, it is true that they are nothing to me. It is not possible
that they should be. The difference between them and me is
abysmal, immeasurable. They have no intellect.”
“No intellect?”
“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 me—there 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 him—
caring 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 spider—he 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
nothing. I have done men good service, but no ill turns.
“The elephant lives a century, the red spider a day; in power,
intellect, and dignity the one creature is separated from the
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other by a distance which is simply astronomical. Yet in these,
as in all qualities, man is immeasurably further below me than
is the wee spider below the elephant.
“Man’s mind clumsily and tediously and laboriously patches
little trivialities together and gets a result—such as it is. My
mind creates! Do you get the force of that? Creates anything it
desires—and in a moment. Creates without material. Creates
fluids, solids, colors—anything, everything—out 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 you—created.
“I think a poem, music, the record of a game of chess—
anything—and it is there. This is the immortal mind—nothing
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 accumulate are mine; he can forget,
and he does forget, but I retain.
“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 spider—
supposing he can see it—but he could not love it. His love
is for his own kind—for his equals. An angel’s love is sublime,
adorable, divine, beyond the imagination of man—infinitely
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

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and the boys, I like Father Peter, and for your sakes I am doing
all these things for the villagers.”
He saw that I was thinking a sarcasm, and he explained his
position.
“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 brick—and
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 grave.”
“Does God order the career?”
“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
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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 time—
say in boyhood—Columbus 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 any other appointed act—“
“As the conquering of a continent, for instance?”
“Yes. Now, then, no man ever does drop a link—the 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 link—a thought bound to occur
to him at that precise moment, and made certain by the first
act of his babyhood.”
It seemed so dismal!
“He is a prisoner for life,” I said sorrowfully, “and cannot get
free.”
“No, of himself he cannot get away from the consequences of
his first childish act. But I can free him.”
I looked up wistfully.
“I have changed the careers of a number of your villagers.”
I tried to thank him, but found it difficult, and let it drop.
“I shall make some other changes. You know that little Lisa
Brandt?”
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“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 shall change her future.”
“Make it better?” I asked.
“Yes. And I will change the future of Nikolaus.”
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.”
“It is my intention.”
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 it did not happen. He proceeded with his
subject:
“Nicky’s appointed life is sixty-two years.”
“That’s grand!” I said.
“Lisa’s, thirty-six. 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.”
It made me feel creepy; it was uncanny.
“But for this change certain things would happen twelve days
from now. For instance, Nikolaus would save Lisa from drowning.
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He would arrive on the scene at exactly the right moment—four
minutes past ten, the long-ago appointed instant of time—and
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 both will
drown.”
“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 must hear
him out.
“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 after-
effects; for forty-six 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?”
“Oh no! Oh, not for the world! In charity and pity leave it as
it is.”
“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 now—a deed begun and
ended in six minutes—and get for all reward those forty-six
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 self-satisfaction
is paid for—or punished—by years of suffering.”
I wondered what poor little Lisa’s early death would save her
from. He answered the thought:

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“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 mother would save her life if
she could. Am I not kinder than her mother?”
“Yes—oh, indeed yes; and wiser.”
“Father Peter’s case is coming on presently. He will be
acquitted, through unassailable proofs of his innocence.”
“Why, Satan, how can that be? Do you really think it?”
“Indeed, I know it. His good name will be restored, and the
rest of his life will be happy.”
“I can believe it. To restore his good name will have that effect.”
“His happiness will not proceed from that cause. I shall change
his life that day, for his good. He will never know his good name
has been restored.”
In my mind—and modestly—I asked for particulars, but
Satan paid no attention to my thought. Next, my mind
wandered to the astrologer, and I wondered where he might be.
“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
him and am quite willing to do him a kindness. I think I shall
get him burned.”
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, where he would be handy.
“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
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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 have but to think the journey, and it is accomplished.”
I held out my hand and said, “The light lies upon it; think it
into a glass of wine, Satan.”
He did it. I drank the wine.
“Break the glass,” he said.
I broke it.
“There—you 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 lot—your 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 saying, “Yes, tell Seppi, but no other.”
It was the answer to my thought.

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70
 Chapter 8

S leep 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. To-morrow 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 days—
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only 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, and forgive.”
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 disappeared; but it was back now, and not dim.
Once at school, when we were eleven, I upset my ink
and spoiled four copy-books, and was in danger of severe
punishment; but I put it upon him, and he got the whipping.
And only last year I had cheated him in a trade, giving him
a large fish-hook which was partly broken through for three
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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, but said, “A trade is a trade; the hook was bad, but that
was not your fault.”
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 panes.
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:
“Twelve days!—less than twelve days.”
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 face to face. He shouted, gaily:
“Hi-hi! What is the matter? Have you seen a ghost?”
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
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 The Mysterious Stranger
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.
That was the fatal day. We were already counting the hours,
too.
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 fish-hooks—all I had—and made him take
them; and Seppi gave him his new knife and a humming-top
painted red and yellow—atonements 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 parted at last, he was radiant,
and said he had never had such a happy day.
As we walked along homeward, Seppi said, “We always prized
him, but never so much as now, when we are going to lose him.”
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
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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 it—a boys-and-girls’ 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 it—one can refuse
nothing to a dying friend. But it was dreadful, for really we were
inviting them to his funeral.
It was an awful eleven days; and yet, with a lifetime stretching
back between to-day 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.
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And sorry for the father, too; our thought being, “If he only
knew—if 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 matter was. His
mother said:
“His father is out of all patience with these goings-on, 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 heart to
remember it some day.”
She was ironing at the time, and her back was partly toward
me. She turned about with a startled or wondering look in her
face and said, “What do you mean by that?”
I was not prepared, and didn’t know anything to say; so it
was awkward, for she kept looking at me; but Seppi was alert
and spoke up:
“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.”
“Did he say that? Did he?” and she put her apron to her eyes.
“You can ask Theodor—he will tell you the same.”
“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 think—all 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

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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 things they were saying by accident.
Seppi asked if Nikolaus might go out with us.
“I am sorry,” she answered, “but he can’t. To punish him further,
his father doesn’t allow him to go out of the house to-day.”
We had a great hope! I saw it in Seppi’s eyes. We thought, “If
he cannot leave the house, he cannot be drowned.” Seppi asked,
to make sure:
“Must he stay in all day, or only the morning?”
“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 cakes—for yourselves—and give him this one, from
his mother.”
The first thing we noticed when we entered Nikolaus’s room
was the time—a 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. It’s drying, in the
kitchen; I’ll fetch it.”
He had been spending his penny savings in fanciful trifles
of various kinds, to go as prizes in the games, and they were
marshaled with fine and showy effect upon the table. He said:
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 The Mysterious Stranger
“Examine them at your leisure while I get mother to touch up
the kite with her iron if it isn’t dry enough yet.”
Then he tripped out and went clattering down-stairs,
whistling.
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 minute-hand jumped we
nodded recognition—one 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 death-point. Theodor, he is going to be saved! He’s going
to—“
“Hush! I’m on needles. Watch the clock and keep still.”
Five minutes more. We were panting with the strain and the
excitement. Another three minutes, and there was a footstep
on the stair.
“Saved!” And we jumped up and faced the door.
The old mother entered, bringing the kite. “Isn’t it a beauty?”
she said. “And, dear me, how he has slaved over it—ever 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 bridge—any 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—“
“But where is he?”
“He? Oh, he’ll be here soon; he’s gone out a minute.”
“Gone out?”
“Yes. Just as he came down-stairs 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
orders—go and look her up.... Why, how white you two do look!
I do believe you are sick. Sit down; I’ll fetch something. That
cake has disagreed with you. It is a little heavy, but I thought—“
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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 point from every direction.
“Oh, it is all over—poor Nikolaus! Why, oh, why did she let
him get out of the house!”
“Come away,” said Seppi, half sobbing, “come quick—we can’t
bear to meet her; in five minutes she will know.”
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 him last night, and him begging me, his own mother, to
be his friend.”
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 alive and well now, and she
was the cause of his death.
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
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 The Mysterious Stranger
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 tear-drenched 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 harm—and here is His answer!”
Why, He had saved it from harm—but she did not know.
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 compassion. I will never pray again.”
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 to God to spare the life of sick persons, but I have
never done it.
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 two-thirds 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 thought it very good of him, but he said
money did not cost him anything.
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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
cattle-yard, 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 forty-two years to live, and her shortest
one twenty-nine, 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 then we gasped out, “Do it!”
“It is done,” he said; “she was going around a corner; I have
turned her back; it has changed her career.”
“Then what will happen, Satan?”
“It is happening now. She is having words with Fischer, the
weaver. In his anger Fischer will straightway do what he would
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not have done but for this accident. He was present when she
stood over her child’s body and uttered those blasphemies.”
“What will he do?”
“He is doing it now—betraying her. In three days she will go
to the stake.”
We could not speak; we were frozen with horror, for if we
had not meddled with her career she would have been spared
this awful fate. Satan noticed these thoughts, and said:
“What you are thinking is strictly human-like—that is to say,
foolish. The woman is advantaged. Die when she might, she
would go to heaven. By this prompt death she gets twenty-
nine years more of heaven than she is entitled to, and escapes
twenty-nine years of misery here.”
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
the thought of it.
After a little I began to feel troubled about Fischer, and asked,
timidly, “Does this episode change Fischer’s life-scheme, Satan?”
“Change it? Why, certainly. And radically. If he had not met
Frau Brandt awhile ago he would die next year, thirty-four
years of age. Now he will live to be ninety, and have a pretty
prosperous and comfortable life of it, as human lives go.”
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 question a moment, then said, with some
hesitation:
“Well, the fact is, it is a delicate point. Under his several former
possible life-careers he was going to heaven.”
We were aghast. “Oh, Satan! and under this one—“
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“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 have acted so.”
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
theoretically—that 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 Fischer—there were
plenty more Fischers.
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 much trouble as they might to keep them from it.
“Oh, stop them, Satan!” It was out before we remembered that
he could not interrupt them for a moment without changing
their whole after-lives. He puffed a little puff toward them with
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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
life-chart was changed.
“Yes, entirely. Some have gained years, some have lost them.
Some few will profit in various ways by the change, but only
that few.”
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 life-charts and suggest improvements began
to fade out and give place to other interests.
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 dead. Pronounce
your sentence and let me go; I am tired of your society.”
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 market-place, 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

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hard face softened, and she looked upon the packed crowd in
front of her and said, with gentleness:
“We played together once, in long-agone days when we were
innocent little creatures. For the sake of that, I forgive you.”
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; and we were glad of her death and not
sorry that we had brought it about.
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. Being boys, we wanted to
be entertained; we asked him to do a show for us.
“Very well,” he said; “would you like to see a history of the
progress of the human race?—its development of that product
which it calls civilization?”
We said we should.
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, vengeful and unrepentant.
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 showing veiled and dim through the
rain. Satan said:

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“The progress of your race was not satisfactory. It is to have
another chance now.”
The scene changed, and we saw Noah overcome with wine.
Next, we had Sodom and Gomorrah, and “the attempt to
discover two or three respectable persons there,” as Satan
described it. Next, Lot and his daughters in the cave.
Next came the Hebraic wars, and we saw the victors massacre
the survivors and their cattle, and save the young girls alive and
distribute them around.
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 have stained our hands in it if
we had wanted to.
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
orphans,” as Satan explained.
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 other signs of the
progress of the human race,” as Satan observed.
And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other
wars—all 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 purpose—there is no such war in the history of
the race.”

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“Now,” said Satan, “you have seen your progress down to the
present, and you must confess that it is wonderful—in its way.
We must now exhibit the future.”
He showed us slaughters more terrible in their destruction
of life, more devastating in their engines of war, than any we
had seen.
“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 the end of time.”
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 is nothing to them; they do
not know what it is, except by hearsay.
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 best—to kill
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being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest
incident in its history—but 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
Christian—not to acquire his religion, but his guns. The Turk
and the Chinaman will buy those to kill missionaries and
converts with.”
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
battle-smoke through which the flags glinted and the red jets
from the cannon darted; and always we heard the thunder of
the guns and the cries of the dying.
“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 nonsense—to 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 heart—if you have one—you 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
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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 which has not visited
this world before.”
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 worshipingly:
“We shall be there some day, and then—“
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 ever see his?

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 Chapter 9

I t 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 witch-hunting
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 barber-surgeon 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.

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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 been noticed and spoken of. Satan
burst out laughing.
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 hear, and said:
“What are you laughing at? Answer! Moreover, please explain
to the company why you threw no stone.”
“Are you sure I did not throw a stone?”
“Yes. You needn’t try to get out of it; I had my eye on you.”
“And I—I noticed you!” shouted two others.
“Three witnesses,” said Satan: “Mueller, the blacksmith; Klein,
the butcher’s man; Pfeiffer, the weaver’s journeyman. Three
very ordinary liars. Are there any more?”
“Never mind whether there are others or not, and never
mind about what you consider us—three’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 mouthpiece to the
public and hero of the occasion. “What are you laughing at?”
Satan smiled and answered, pleasantly: “To see three cowards
stoning a dying lady when they were so near death themselves.”
You could see the superstitious crowd shrink and catch their
breath, under the sudden shock. The blacksmith, with a show
of bravado, said:
“Pooh! What do you know about it?”

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“I? Everything. By profession I am a fortune-teller, and I read
the hands of you three—and some others—when you lifted
them to stone the woman. One of you will die to-morrow week;
another of you will die to-night; the third has but five minutes
to live—and yonder is the clock!”
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 after, I promise
you that.”
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 another; and
their lips moved, but no words came. Then Satan said:
“Three saw that I threw no stone. Perhaps there are others; let
them speak.”
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 one—the
dead lady hanging from her rope, her troubles forgotten, her
spirit at peace.
So we walked away, and I was not at ease, but was saying to
myself, “He told them he was laughing at them, but it was a
lie—he was laughing at me.”
That made him laugh again, and he said, “Yes, I was laughing
at you, because, in fear of what others might report about you,
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you stoned the woman when your heart revolted at the act—
but I was laughing at the others, too.”
“Why?”
“Because their case was yours.”
“How is that?”
“Well, there were sixty-eight people there, and sixty-two of
them had no more desire to throw a stone than you had.”
“Satan!”
“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
kind-hearted 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 kind-hearted 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 ninety-
nine 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
to-day, 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 noise—perhaps even a single daring
man with a big voice and a determined front will do it—and
in a week all the sheep will wheel and follow him, and witch-
hunting will come to a sudden end.
“Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon
that large defect in your race—the 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
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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 war—what
mutton you are, and how ridiculous!”
“In war? How?”
“There has never been a just one, never an honorable one—
on 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 handful—as usual—will shout for the
war. The pulpit will—warily and cautiously—object—at 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 anti-war 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 speakers—as earlier—but do not dare to
say so. And now the whole nation—pulpit and all—will take up
the war-cry, 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 conscience-soothing 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

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is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after
this process of grotesque self-deception.”

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 Chapter 10

D ays 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 witch-hater 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 combination—her 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 public toward him again.
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
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thoroughly, thinking to find some valuable grains among the
chaff, but the harvest was poor, of course.
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 was like to die of his miseries unless he
got relief soon.
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 privileged.
The astrologer was put in the witness-box. He had on his best
hat and robe for the occasion.
Question. You claim that this money is yours?
Answer. I do.
Q. How did you come by it?
A. I found the bag in the road when I was returning from a
journey.
Q. When?
A. More than two years ago.
Q. What did you do with it?
A. I brought it home and hid it in a secret place in my
observatory, intending to find the owner if I could.
Q. You endeavored to find him?
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A. I made diligent inquiry during several months, but nothing
came of it.
Q. And then?
A. I thought it not worth while to look further, and was
minded to use the money in finishing the wing of the foundling-
asylum connected with the priory and nunnery. So I took it out
of its hiding-place and counted it to see if any of it was missing.
And then—
Q. Why do you stop? Proceed.
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 and there stood
Father Peter behind me.
Several murmured, “That looks bad,” but others answered,
“Ah, but he is such a liar!”
Q. That made you uneasy?
A. No; I thought nothing of it at the time, for Father Peter
often came to me unannounced to ask for a little help in his
need.
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 her peace.
Q. Proceed.
A. In the end I was afraid to contribute the money to the
foundling-asylum, 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
coincidences.
Q. Pray name them.
A. Father Peter had found his money in a path—I had found
mine in a road. Father Peter’s find consisted exclusively of gold

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ducats—mine also. Father Peter found eleven hundred and
seven ducats—I exactly the same.
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 questions—for our story was a little
delicate and it would be cruel for him to put any strain upon
it—everybody 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 longer, but broke down and cried, and I was so
sorry for her.
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 know—stunning, in fact—but no one
was noticing him; so we knew by that that he was invisible.
The lawyer was saying his last words; and while he was saying
them Satan began to melt into Wilhelm. He melted into him
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and disappeared; and then there was a change, when his spirit
began to look out of Wilhelm’s eyes.
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 victory—the
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 pathetic.”
He sat down. Wilhelm rose and said:
“From the testimony of the accuser I gather that he found
this money in a road more than two years ago. Correct me, sir,
if I misunderstood you.”
The astrologer said his understanding of it was correct.
“And the money so found was never out of his hands
thenceforth up to a certain definite date—the last day of last
year. Correct me, sir, if I am wrong.”
The astrologer nodded his head. Wilhelm turned to the
bench and said:
“If I prove that this money here was not that money, then it
is not his?”
“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.
The judges decided that his contention was just and must be
allowed.
“But this is not a new witness,” said Wilhelm. “It has already
been partly examined. I speak of the coin.”
“The coin? What can the coin say?”

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“It can say it is not the coin that the astrologer once possessed.
It can say it was not in existence last December. By its date it
can say this.”
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 undeserved humiliation
of imprisonment and trial. The case is dismissed.”
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 Father
Peter’s for good and all, now.
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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, and you stand
forever disgraced as a thief—by verdict of the court!”
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 such fustian, and was as happy as
a bird. He thought he was Emperor!
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 trouble—it 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
Duchess—means 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 now—isn’t it so?”

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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 said, “Bless
you, my people!”
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 embarrassed, but
said, quite simply and composedly:
“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 remain, the one utterly happy person
in this empire.”
“But the method of it, Satan, the method! Couldn’t you have
done it without depriving him of his reason?”
It was difficult to irritate Satan, but that accomplished it.
“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 silver-gilt fiction; you see the
result—and you criticize! I said I would make him permanently
happy, and I have done it. I have made him happy by the only
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means possible to his race—and you are not satisfied!” He
heaved a discouraged sigh, and said, “It seems to me that this
race is hard to please.”
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 processes—at that time.
Satan was accustomed to say that our race lived a life of
continuous and uninterrupted self-deception. 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 detail—
the 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
gold-dust. You have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing
more; a multitude of you possess that. This multitude see the
comic side of a thousand low-grade and trivial things—broad
incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities, evokers of the
horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade 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 them—and by laughing at them destroy them? For
your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective
weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication,
persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it a
little—weaken 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.”
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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 breech-
cloth, and very considerately conferred on me a temporary
knowledge of the language.
The juggler exhibited a seed, covered it with earth in a small
flower-pot, 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:
“Why do you cover the pot? Can’t you grow the tree in the
sunlight?”
“No,” said the juggler; “no one can do that.”
“You are only an apprentice; you don’t know your trade. Give
me the seed. I will show you.” He took the seed and said, “What
shall I raise from it?”
“It is a cherry seed; of course you will raise a cherry.”
“Oh no; that is a trifle; any novice can do that. Shall I raise an
orange-tree from it?”
“Oh yes!” and the juggler laughed.
“And shall I make it bear other fruits as well as oranges?”
“If God wills!” and they all laughed.
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 colors—oranges, 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,
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and everybody came running to see the wonder—and 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 in white
linen and sun-helmet arrived, and exclaimed, angrily:
“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 fingers
to his forehead, in the native way, and said:
“Please let them have their pleasure for an hour, sir—only
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 the look of
one who is surprised, and not gratified. Satan said:
“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 night—and 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 more—you would not reach there; make no business or
pleasure engagements which require you to go outside your
gate at night—you cannot afford the risk; do not rent or sell
this place—it would be injudicious.”
The foreigner was proud and wouldn’t beg, but I thought he
looked as if he would like to. While he stood gazing at Satan we
vanished away and landed in Ceylon.
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I was sorry for that man; sorry Satan hadn’t been his
customary self and killed him or made him a lunatic. It would
have been a mercy. Satan overheard the thought, and said:
“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 won’t tell her?”
“He? He will not trust that secret with any one; he will reflect
that it could be revealed in sleep, in the hearing of some
Portuguese guest’s servant some time or other.”
“Did none of those natives understand what you said to him?”
“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 will make his days
uncomfortable—I have already arranged for his nights.”
It grieved me, though not sharply, to see him take such a
malicious satisfaction in his plans for this foreigner.
“Does he believe what you told him, Satan?”
“He thought he didn’t, but our vanishing helped. The tree,
where there had been no tree before—that helped. The insane
and uncanny variety of fruits—the sudden withering—all 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 begin his changed career with a very natural
precaution—for him.”
“What is that?”
“He will fetch a priest to cast out the tree’s devil. You are such
a humorous race—and don’t suspect it.”
“Will he tell the priest?”
“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
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Portuguese will give up that scheme and get his watering-pot
ready.”
“But the priest will burn the tree. I know it; he will not allow
it to remain.”
“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.”
“Comparatively. It must not be mistaken for a holiday.”
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 days—not out of malice—I am
sure of that—it only seemed to amuse and interest him, just as
a naturalist might be amused and interested by a collection of
ants.

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 Chapter 11

F or 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 good-by, 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 longer period
than I could wait for his return.
“And you are going away, and will not come back any more?”
“Yes,” he said. “We have comraded long together, and it has
been pleasant—pleasant for both; but I must go now, and we
shall not see each other any more.”
“In this life, Satan, but in another? We shall meet in another,
surely?”
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 feeling that the
incredible words might be true—even must be true.
“Have you never suspected this, Theodor?”
“No. How could I? But if it can only be true—“
“It is true.”
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A gust of thankfulness rose in my breast, but a doubt checked
it before it could issue in words, and I said, “But—but—we have
seen that future life—seen it in its actuality, and so—“
“It was a vision—it had no existence.”
I could hardly breathe for the great hope that was struggling
in me. “A vision?—a vi—“
“Life itself is only a vision, a dream.”
It was electrical. By God! I had had that very thought a
thousand times in my musings!
“Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world—the
sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream;
they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and
you!”
“I!”
“And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no
bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence; I am
but a dream—your 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 made me....
“I am perishing already—I am failing—I am passing away. In
a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its
limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever—for you
will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your
nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant,
have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other
dreams, and better!
“Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago—
centuries, 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 insane—like 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
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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 hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths
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 this poor, abused
slave to worship him!...
“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
freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of
it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized
them earlier.
“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 dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists
but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a
useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among
the empty eternities!”
He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized,
that all he had said was true.

The End

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Bibliography
Twain, Mark [Samuel Langhorne Clemens]. Extracts From Adam’s Diary:
Translated from the original MS. New York, NY and London, GB: Harper
& Brothers, 1904.

Twain, Mark [Samuel Langhorne Clemens]. Eve’s Diary: Translated from the
original MS. New York, NY and London, GB: Harper & Brothers, 1906.

Twain, Mark [Samuel Langhorne Clemens]. The Mysterious Stranger: A

Romance. New York, NY and London, GB: Harper & Brothers, 1916.

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