take the view of nature, it is a pleasurable feeling.  It enhances the amount of ease, whatever that may be, which I enjoy.  I am in no pain.  That brute who is’—­and he flicked with a stick he carried the uncovered wound of a wretch upon the roadside—­’makes me more satisfied with my condition.  Ah! you think it is I who am the brute?  You will change your mind by and by.’

‘Never!’ I cried, wrenching my arm from his with an effort, ’if I should live a hundred years.’

‘A hundred years,—­a drop in the bucket!’ he said with his silent laugh.  ’You will live forever, and you will come to my view; and we shall meet in the course of ages, from time to time, to compare notes.  I would say good-by after the old fashion, but you are but newly arrived, and I will not treat you so badly as that.’  With which he parted from me, waving his hand, with his everlasting horrible smile.

‘Good-by!’ I said to myself, ’good-by! why should it be treating me badly to say good-by—­’

I was startled by a buffet on the mouth.  ‘Take that!’ cried some one, ’to teach you how to wish the worst of tortures to people who have done you no harm.’

’What have I said?  I meant no harm; I repeated only what is the commonest civility, the merest good manners.’

‘You wished,’ said the man who had struck me,—­’I won’t repeat the words:  to me, for it was I only that heard them, the awful company that hurts most, that sets everything before us, both past and to come, and cuts like a sword and burns like fire.  I’ll say it to yourself, and see how it feels.  God be with you!  There! it is said, and we all must bear it, thanks, you fool and accursed, to you.’

And then there came a pause over all the place, an awful stillness,—­hundreds of men and women standing clutching with desperate movements at their hearts as if to tear them out, moving their heads as if to dash them against the wall, wringing their hands, with a look upon all their convulsed faces which I can never forget.  They all turned to me, cursing me with those horrible eyes of anguish.  And everything was still; the noise all stopped for a moment, the air all silent, with a silence that could be felt.  And then suddenly out of the crowd there came a great piercing cry; and everything began again exactly as before.

While this pause occurred, and while I stood wondering, bewildered, understanding nothing, there came over me a darkness, a blackness, a sense of misery such as never in all my life—­though I have known troubles enough—­I had felt before.  All that had happened to me throughout my existence seemed to rise pale and terrible in a hundred scenes before me,—­all momentary, intense, as if each was the present moment.  And in each of these scenes I saw what I had never seen before.  I saw where I had taken the wrong instead of the right step, in what wantonness, with what self-will it had been done; how God (I shuddered at the name) had spoken