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 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