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.

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