nd leaving it in
her husband's grasp, who stood stock still staring after her as she
rushed on, screaming with all her might:

"I'm coming, I'm coming."

When he could see her no longer, the husband collected his senses,
went back to the house, and said:

"If you are mad and want to die, go in God's name, I can't help you;
I've told you often enough that you must follow no one, no matter who
called you."

Days passed, many days; weeks, months, years followed, and the peace
of the man's household was not disturbed again.

But at last one morning, when he went to his barber's as usual to be
shaved, just as he had the soap on his chin, and the shop was full of
people, he began to shout:

"I won't come, do you hear, I won't come!"

The barber and his customers all stared in amazement. The man, looking
toward the door, said again: "Take notice, once for all, that I won't
come, and go away from there."

Afterward he cried:

"Go away, do you hear, if you want to get off with a whole skin, for I
tell you a thousand times I won't come."

Then, as if some one was standing at the door constantly calling him,
he grew angry and raved at the person for not leaving him in peace. At
last he sprang up and snatched the razor from the barber's hand,
crying:

"Give it to me, that I may show him what it is to continually annoy
people."

And he ran at full speed after the person who, he said, was calling
him, but whom nobody else could see. The poor barber, who did not want
to lose his razor, followed. The man ran, the barber pursued, till
they passed beyond the city limits, and, just outside of the town, the
man fell into a chasm from which he did not come out again, so he
also, like all the rest, followed the voice that called him.

The barber, who returned home panting for breath, told everybody he
met what had happened and so the belief spread through the country
that the people, who had gone away and not returned, had fallen into
that gulf, for until then no one had known what became of those who
followed the person that summoned them.

When a throng set out to visit the scene of misfortune, to see the
insatiable gulf which swallowed up all the people and yet never had
enough, nothing was found; it looked as if, since the beginning of
the world, nothing had been there except a broad plain, and from that
time the population of the neighborhood began to die like the human
beings in the rest of the earth.

The O