“The difference between man and me?  The difference between a mortal and an immortal? between a cloud and a spirit?” He picked up a wood-louse that was creeping along a piece of bark:  “What is the difference between Caesar and this?”

I said, “One cannot compare things which by their nature and by the interval between them are not comparable.”

“You have answered your own question,” he said.  “I will expand it.  Man is made of dirt—­I saw him made.  I am not made of dirt.  Man is a museum of diseases, a home of impurities; he comes to-day and is gone to-morrow; he begins as dirt and departs as stench; I am of the aristocracy of the Imperishables.  And man has the Moral Sense.  You understand?  He has the Moral Sense.  That would seem to be difference enough between us, all by itself.”

He stopped there, as if that settled the matter.  I was sorry, for at that time I had but a dim idea of what the Moral Sense was.  I merely knew that we were proud of having it, and when he talked like that about it, it wounded me, and I felt as a girl feels who thinks her dearest finery is being admired and then overhears strangers making fun of it.  For a while we were all silent, and I, for one, was depressed.  Then Satan began to chat again, and soon he was sparkling along in such a cheerful and vivacious vein that my spirits rose once more.  He told some very cunning things that put us in a gale of laughter; and when he was telling about the time that Samson tied the torches to the foxes’ tails and set them loose in the Philistines’ corn, and Samson sitting on the fence slapping his thighs and laughing, with the tears running down his cheeks, and lost his balance and fell off the fence, the memory of that picture got him to laughing, too, and we did have a most lovely and jolly time.  By and by he said: 

“I am going on my errand now.”

“Don’t!” we all said.  “Don’t go; stay with us.  You won’t come back.”

“Yes, I will; I give you my word.”

“When?  To-night?  Say when.”

“It won’t be long.  You will see.”

“We like you.”

“And I you.  And as a proof of it I will show you something fine to see.  Usually when I go I merely vanish; but now I will dissolve myself and let you see me do it.”

He stood up, and it was quickly finished.  He thinned away and thinned away until he was a soap-bubble, except that he kept his shape.  You could see the bushes through him as clearly as you see things through a soap-bubble, and all over him played and flashed the delicate iridescent colors of the bubble, and along with them was that thing shaped like a window-sash which you always see on the globe of the bubble.  You have seen a bubble strike the carpet and lightly bound along two or three times before it bursts.  He did that.  He sprang—­touched the grass —­bounded—­floated along—­touched again—­and so on, and presently exploded—­puff! and in his place was vacancy.