connections, and in the empty sockets there shone a blue phosphoric
light instead of eyes. It crawled out of the ground, shook its bones
in order to throw off the earth that stuck to them, making a dry,
rattling noise with them, and raising up its skull, looked with its
cold, blue eyes at the murky, cloud-covered sky. "I hope you are
well!" said the devil.

"How can I be?" curtly answered the author. He spoke in a strange, low
voice, as if two bones were grating against each other.

"Oh, excuse my greeting!" the devil said pleasantly.

"Never mind!... But why have you raised me?"

"I just wanted to take a walk with you, though the weather is very
bad.

"I suppose you are not afraid of catching a cold?" asked the devil.

"Not at all, I got used to catching colds during my lifetime."

"Yes, I remember, you died pretty cold."

"I should say I did! They had poured enough cold water over me all my
life."

They walked beside each other over the narrow path, between graves and
crosses. Two blue beams fell from the author's eyes upon the ground
and lit the way for the devil. A drizzling rain sprinkled over them,
and the wind freely passed between the author's bare ribs and through
his breast where there was no longer a heart.

"We are going to town?" he asked the devil.

"What interests you there?"

"Life, my dear sir," the author said impassionately.

"What! It still has a meaning for you?"

"Indeed it has!"

"But why?"

"How am I to say it? A man measures all by the quantity of his effort,
and if he carries a common stone down from the summit of Ararat, that
stone becomes a gem to him."

"Poor fellow!" smiled the devil.

"But also happy man!" the author retorted coldly.

The devil shrugged his shoulders.

They left the churchyard, and before them lay a street,--two rows of
houses, and between them was darkness in which the miserable lamps
clearly proved the want of light upon earth.

"Tell me," the devil spoke after a pause, "how do you like your
grave?"

"Now I am used to it, and it is all right: it is very quiet there."

"Is it not damp down there in the Fall?" asked the devil.

"A little. But you get used to that. The greatest annoyance comes from
those various idiots who ramble over the cemetery and accidentally
stumble on my grave. I don't know how long I have been lying in my
grave, for I and everything around me is unchangeable, and the concept
of time does not exist for me."

"You ha