id the monk, meekly from under loads of white
beard, "but I fear I do not understand; was it in order that I might rub
my shoulder against men of all kinds that you put me inside this thing?"

"An entertaining retort, in the narrow and deductive manner of the
Middle Ages," replied the Professor, calmly, "but even upon your own
basis I will illustrate my point. We are up in the sky. In your religion
and all the religions, as far as I know (and I know everything), the sky
is made the symbol of everything that is sacred and merciful. Well, now
you are in the sky, you know better. Phrase it how you like, twist it
how you like, you know that you know better. You know what are a man's
real feelings about the heavens, when he finds himself alone in the
heavens, surrounded by the heavens. You know the truth, and the truth
is this. The heavens are evil, the sky is evil, the stars are evil. This
mere space, this mere quantity, terrifies a man more than tigers or the
terrible plague. You know that since our science has spoken, the bottom
has fallen out of the Universe. Now, heaven is the hopeless thing,
more hopeless than any hell. Now, if there be any comfort for all your
miserable progeny of morbid apes, it must be in the earth, underneath
you, under the roots of the grass, in the place where hell was of old.
The fiery crypts, the lurid cellars of the underworld, to which you once
condemned the wicked, are hideous enough, but at least they are more
homely than the heaven in which we ride. And the time will come when you
will all hide in them, to escape the horror of the stars."

"I hope you will excuse my interrupting you," said Michael, with a
slight cough, "but I have always noticed----"

"Go on, pray go on," said Professor Lucifer, radiantly, "I really like
to draw out your simple ideas."

"Well, the fact is," said the other, "that much as I admire your
rhetoric and the rhetoric of your school, from a purely verbal point
of view, such little study of you and your school in human history as I
have been enabled to make has led me to--er--rather singular conclusion,
which I find great difficulty in expressing, especially in a foreign
language."

"Come, come," said the Professor, encouragingly, "I'll help you out. How
did my view strike you?"

"Well, the truth is, I know I don't express it properly, but somehow
it seemed to me that you always convey ideas of that kind with most
eloquence, when--er--when----"

"Oh! get on,