ve been in the ground four years,--it will soon be five," said
the devil.

"Indeed? Well then, there have been three people at my grave during
that time. Those accursed people make me nervous. One, you see,
straight away denied the fact of my existence: he read my name on the
tombstone and said confidently: 'There never was such a man! I have
never read him, though I remember such a name: when I was a boy, there
lived a man of that name who had a broker's shop in our street.' How
do you like that? And my articles appeared for sixteen years in the
most popular periodicals, and three times during my lifetime my books
came out in separate editions."

"There were two more editions since your death," the devil informed
him.

"Well, you see? Then came two, and one of them said: 'Oh, that's that
fellow!' 'Yes, that is he!' answered the other. 'Yes, they used to
read him in the auld lang syne.' 'They read a lot of them.' 'What was
it he preached?' 'Oh, generally, ideas of beauty, goodness, and so
forth.' 'Oh, yes, I remember.' 'He had a heavy tongue.' 'There is a
lot of them in the ground:--yes, Russia is rich in talents' ... And
those asses went away. It is true, warm words do not raise the
temperature of the grave, and I do not care for that, yet it hurts me.
And oh, how I wanted to give them a piece of my mind!"

"You ought to have given them a fine tongue-lashing!" smiled the
devil.

"No, that would not have done. On the verge of the twentieth century
it would be absurd for dead people to scold, and, besides, it would be
hard on the materialists."

The devil again felt the ennui coming over him.

This author had always wished in his lifetime to be a bridegroom at
all weddings and a corpse at all burials, and now that all is dead in
him, his egotism is still alive. Is man of any importance to life? Of
importance is only the human spirit, and only the spirit deserves
applause and recognition.... How annoying people are! The devil was on
the point of proposing to the author to return to his grave, when an
idea flashed through his evil head. They had just reached a square,
and heavy masses of buildings surrounded them on all sides. The dark,
wet sky hung low over the square; it seemed as though it rested on the
roofs and murkily looked at the dirty earth.

"Say," said the devil as he inclined pleasantly towards the author,
"don't you want to know how your wife is getting on?"

"I don't know whether I want to," the a