And they flew away in haste, and stood by the criminals’ wooden couch, where they slept side by side in long rows.  One of them started up from his sleep like a wild animal, and uttered a hideous scream:  he struck his companion with his sharp elbow, and the latter turned sleepily round.

“Hold your tongue, you beast, and sleep! this is your way every night!  Every night!” he repeated; “yes, you come every night, howling and choking me!  I have done one thing or another in a passion; I was born with a passionate temper, and it has brought me in here a second time; but if I have done wrong, so have I also got my punishment.  But one thing I have not confessed.  When I last went out from here, and passed by my master’s farm, one thing and another boiled up in me, and I directly stroked a lucifer against the wall:  it came a little too near the thatch, and everything was burnt—­hot-headedness came over it, just as it comes over me, I helped to save the cattle and furniture.  Nothing living was burnt, except a flock of pigeons:  they flew into the flames, and the yard dog.  I had not thought of the dog.  I could hear it howl, and that howl I always hear yet, when I would sleep; and if I do get to sleep, the dog comes also—­so large and hairy!  He lies down on me, howls, and strangles me!  Do but hear what I am telling you.  Snore—­yes, that you can—­snore the whole night through, and I not even a quarter of an hour!”

And the blood shone from the eyes of the fiery one; he fell on his companion, and struck him in the face with his clenched fist.

“Angry Mads has become mad again!” resounded on all sides, and the other rascals seized hold of him, wrestled with him, and bent him double, so that his head was forced between his legs, where they bound it fast, so that the blood was nearly springing out of his eyes, and all the pores.

“You will kill him!” said the clergyman,—­“poor unfortunate!” and as he stretched his hands out over him, who had already suffered too severely, in order to prevent further mischief, the scene changed.

They flew through rich halls, and through poor chambers; voluptuousness and envy, all mortal sins strode past them.  A recording angel read their sin and their defence; this was assuredly little for God, for God reads the heart; He knows perfectly the evil that comes within it and from without, He, grace, all-loving kindness.  The hand of the clergyman trembled:  he did not venture to stretch it out, to pluck a hair from the sinner’s head.  And the tears streamed down from his eyes, like the waters of grace and love, which quenched the eternal fire of hell.

The cock then crowed.

“Merciful God!  Thou wilt grant her that peace in the grave which I have not been able to redeem.”

“That I now have!” said the dead; “it was thy hard words, thy dark, human belief of God and his creatures, which drove me to thee!  Learn to know mankind; even in the bad there is a part of God—­a part that will conquer and quench the fire of hell.”