It shows how foolish people are when they blame themselves for anything they have done.  Satan knows, and he said nothing happens that your first act hasn’t arranged to happen and made inevitable; and so, of your own motion you can’t ever alter the scheme or do a thing that will break a link.  Next we heard screams, and Frau Brandt came wildly plowing and plunging through the crowd with her dress in disorder and hair flying loose, and flung herself upon her dead child with moans and kisses and pleadings and endearments; and by and by she rose up almost exhausted with her outpourings of passionate emotion, and clenched her fist and lifted it toward the sky, and her tear-drenched face grew hard and resentful, and she said: 

“For nearly two weeks I have had dreams and presentiments and warnings that death was going to strike what was most precious to me, and day and night and night and day I have groveled in the dirt before Him praying Him to have pity on my innocent child and save it from harm—­and here is His answer!”

Why, He had saved it from harm—­but she did not know.

She wiped the tears from her eyes and cheeks, and stood awhile gazing down at the child and caressing its face and its hair with her hands; then she spoke again in that bitter tone:  “But in His hard heart is no compassion.  I will never pray again.”

She gathered her dead child to her bosom and strode away, the crowd falling back to let her pass, and smitten dumb by the awful words they had heard.  Ah, that poor woman!  It is as Satan said, we do not know good fortune from bad, and are always mistaking the one for the other.  Many a time since I have heard people pray to God to spare the life of sick persons, but I have never done it.

Both funerals took place at the same time in our little church next day.  Everybody was there, including the party guests.  Satan was there, too; which was proper, for it was on account of his efforts that the funerals had happened.  Nikolaus had departed this life without absolution, and a collection was taken up for masses, to get him out of purgatory.  Only two-thirds of the required money was gathered, and the parents were going to try to borrow the rest, but Satan furnished it.  He told us privately that there was no purgatory, but he had contributed in order that Nikolaus’s parents and their friends might be saved from worry and distress.  We thought it very good of him, but he said money did not cost him anything.

At the graveyard the body of little Lisa was seized for debt by a carpenter to whom the mother owed fifty groschen for work done the year before.  She had never been able to pay this, and was not able now.  The carpenter took the corpse home and kept it four days in his cellar, the mother weeping and imploring about his house all the time; then he buried it in his brother’s cattle-yard, without religious ceremonies.  It drove the mother wild with grief