did she get the money from?"

"From the sale of your books!"

"Oh!" said the author and shook his bare and empty skull. "Oh! Then it
simply means that I have worked for a certain clerk?"

"I confess it looks that way," the devil chimed in merrily.

The author looked at the ground and said to the devil: "Take me back
to my grave!"

... It was late. A rain fell, heavy clouds hung in the sky, and the
author rattled his bones as he marched rapidly to his grave.... The
devil walked behind him and whistled merrily.

* * * * *

My reader is, of course, dissatisfied. My reader is surfeited with
literature, and even the people that write only to please him, are
rarely to his taste. In the present case my reader is also
dissatisfied because I have said nothing about hell. As my reader is
justly convinced that after death he will find his way there, he would
like to know something about hell during his lifetime. Really, I can't
tell anything pleasant to my reader on that score, because there is no
hell, no fiery hell which it is so easy to imagine. Yet, there is
something else and infinitely more terrible.

The moment the doctor will have said about you to your friends: "He is
dead!" you will enter an immeasurable, illuminated space, and that is
the space of the consciousness of your mistakes.

You lie in the grave, in a narrow coffin, and your miserable life
rotates about you like a wheel.

It moves painfully slow, and passes before you from your first
conscious step to the last moment of your life.

You will see all that you have hidden from yourself during your
lifetime, all the lies and meanness of your existence: you will think
over anew all your past thoughts, and you will see every wrong step of
yours,--all your life will be gone over, to its minutest details!

And to increase your torments, you will know that on that narrow and
stupid road which you have traversed, others are marching, and pushing
each other, and hurrying, and lying.... And you understand that they
are doing it all only to find out in time how shameful it is to live
such a wretched, soulless life.

And though you see them hastening on towards their destruction, you
are in no way able to warn them: you will not move nor cry, and your
helpless desire to aid them will tear your soul to pieces.

Your life passes before you, and you see it from the start, and there
is no end to the work of your conscience, and the