“If this goes on,” said a voice behind him, “I shall get a holiday.”

Euschemon turned round, and with indescribable dismay perceived a gigantic demon, negligently resting his hand on the top of the bell, and looking as if it would cost him nothing to pitch it and Euschemon together to the other side of the town.

“Avaunt, fiend,” he stammered, with as much dignity as he could muster, “or at least remove thy unhallowed paw from my bell.”

“Come, Eusky,” replied the fiend, with profane familiarity, “don’t be a fool.  You are not really such an ass as to imagine that your virtue has anything to do with the virtue of this bell?”

“Whose virtue then?” demanded Euschemon.

“Why truly,” said the demon, “mine!  When this bell was cast I was imprisoned in it by a potent enchanter, and so long as I am in it no storm can come within sound of its ringing.  I am not allowed to quit it except by night, and then no further than an arm’s length:  this, however, I take the liberty of measuring by my own arm, which happens to be a long one.  This must continue, as I learn, until I receive a kiss from some bishop of distinguished sanctity.  Thou hast done some bishoping in thy time, peradventure?”

Euschemon energetically protested that he had been on earth but a simple laic, which was indeed the fact, and was also the reason why Eulogius and Eucherius despised him, but which, though he did not think it needful to tell the demon, he found a singular relief under present circumstances.

“Well,” continued the fiend, “I wish he may turn up shortly, for I am half deaf already with the banging and booming of this infernal clapper, which seems to have grown much worse of late; and the blessings and the crossings and the aspersions which I have to go through are most repugnant to my tastes, and unsuitable to my position in society.  Bye-bye, Eusky; come up to-morrow night.”  And the fiend slipped back into the bell, and instantly became invisible.

The humiliation of poor Euschemon on learning that he was indebted for his credit to the devil is easier to imagine than to describe.  He did not, however, fail at the rendezvous next night, and found the demon sitting outside the bell in a most affable frame of mind.  It did not take long for the devil and the saint to become very good friends, both wanting company, and the former being apparently as much amused by the latter’s simplicity as the latter was charmed by the former’s knowingness.  Euschemon learned numbers of things of which he had not had the faintest notion.  The demon taught him how to play cards (just invented by the Saracens), and initiated him into divers “arts, though unimagined, yet to be,” such as smoking tobacco, making a book on the Derby, and inditing queer stories for Society journals.  He drew the most profane but irresistibly funny caricatures of Eulogius and Eucherius, and the rest of the host of heaven.  He had been