Through my sympathies, my perceptions and my love I know him; know him as no one else knows him; know him as no one else can ever know him. And you shall not take my golden hope from me – no one shall! He will love me yet, and only me.«

There was a glory in her eyes that made her beautiful. I had not the heart to spoil it; so I kept back the words that were upon my lips: »Marget is probably saying these same things herself.«

I went to my bed with heavy thoughts. What a lot of dismal haps had befallen the village, and certainly Satan seemed to be the father of the whole of them: Father Peter in prison, on account of the money laid in his way by Satan, which furnished Father Adolf the handy pretext he needed; Marget's household shunned and under perilous suspicion on account of that cat's work – cat furnished by Satan; Father Adolf acquiring a frightful and odious reputation, and likely to be burnt at the stake presently – Satan responsible for it; my parents worried, perplexed, distressed about their daughter's new love-freak and the doubtfulness of its outlook; Joseph crushed and shamed; Wilhelm's heart broken and dissipation laying its blight upon his character, his ambition and his fair repute; Marget gone silly, and our Lilly following after; the whole village prodded and pestered into a pathetic delirium about non-existent witches and quaking in its shoes: the whole wide wreck and desolation of hearts and hopes and industries the work of Satan's enthusiastic diligence and morbid passion for business. And he, the author of all the trouble, was the only person concerned that got any rapture out of it. By his spirits one would think he was grateful to be alive and improving things.

I fell asleep to pleasant music presently – 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 – and so much, much further 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 will 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 further verge. It was a tranquil and dreamy picture, beautiful to the eye and restful to the spirit. If we could only make a change like that whenever we wanted to, the world would be easier to live in than it is, for change of scene shifts the mind's burdens to the other shoulder and banishes old 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 an act 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 those things?«

»Well, I will tell you, and you must understand it 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 one 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-machinery 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.