I should not be able to make any one understand how exciting it all was.  You know that kind of quiver that trembles around through you when you are seeing something so strange and enchanting and wonderful that it is just a fearful joy to be alive and look at it; and you know how you gaze, and your lips turn dry and your breath comes short, but you wouldn’t be anywhere but there, not for the world.  I was bursting to ask one question—­I had it on my tongue’s end and could hardly hold it back—­but I was ashamed to ask it; it might be a rudeness.  Satan set an ox down that he had been making, and smiled up at me and said: 

“It wouldn’t be a rudeness, and I should forgive it if it was.  Have I seen him?  Millions of times.  From the time that I was a little child a thousand years old I was his second favorite among the nursery angels of our blood and lineage—­to use a human phrase—­yes, from that time until the Fall, eight thousand years, measured as you count time.”

“Eight—­thousand!”

“Yes.”  He turned to Seppi, and went on as if answering something that was in Seppi’s mind:  “Why, naturally I look like a boy, for that is what I am.  With us what you call time is a spacious thing; it takes a long stretch of it to grow an angel to full age.”  There was a question in my mind, and he turned to me and answered it, “I am sixteen thousand years old—­counting as you count.”  Then he turned to Nikolaus and said:  “No, the Fall did not affect me nor the rest of the relationship.  It was only he that I was named for who ate of the fruit of the tree and then beguiled the man and the woman with it.  We others are still ignorant of sin; we are not able to commit it; we are without blemish, and shall abide in that estate always.  We—­” Two of the little workmen were quarreling, and in buzzing little bumblebee voices they were cursing and swearing at each other; now came blows and blood; then they locked themselves together in a life-and-death struggle.  Satan reached out his hand and crushed the life out of them with his fingers, threw them away, wiped the red from his fingers on his handkerchief, and went on talking where he had left off:  “We cannot do wrong; neither have we any disposition to do it, for we do not know what it is.”

It seemed a strange speech, in the circumstances, but we barely noticed that, we were so shocked and grieved at the wanton murder he had committed—­for murder it was, that was its true name, and it was without palliation or excuse, for the men had not wronged him in any way.  It made us miserable, for we loved him, and had thought him so noble and so beautiful and gracious, and had honestly believed he was an angel; and to have him do this cruel thing—­ah, it lowered him so, and we had had such pride in him.  He went right on talking, just as if nothing had happened, telling about his travels, and the interesting things he had seen in the big worlds of our solar systems