My reader is, of course, dissatisfied. My reader is surfeited with literature, and even the people that write only to please him, are rarely to his taste. In the present case my reader is also dissatisfied because I have said nothing about hell. As my reader is justly convinced that after death he will find his way there, he would like to know something about hell during his lifetime. Really, I can’t tell anything pleasant to my reader on that score, because there is no hell, no fiery hell which it is so easy to imagine. Yet, there is something else and infinitely more terrible. The moment the doctor will have said about you to your friends: “He is dead!” you will enter an immeasurable, illuminated space, and that is the space of the consciousness of your mistakes. You lie in the grave, in a narrow coffin, and your miserable life rotates about you like a wheel. It moves painfully slow, and passes before you from your first conscious step to the last moment of your life. You will see all that you have hidden from yourself during your lifetime, all the lies and meanness of your existence: you will think over anew all your past thoughts, and you will see every wrong step of yours,--all your life will be gone over, to its minutest details! And to increase your torments, you will know that on that narrow and stupid road which you have traversed, others are marching, and pushing each other, and hurrying, and lying.... And you understand that they are doing it all only to find out in time how shameful it is to live such a wretched, soulless life. And though you see them hastening on towards their destruction, you are in no way able to warn them: you will not move nor cry, and your helpless desire to aid them will tear your soul to pieces. Your life passes before you, and you see it from the start, and there is no end to the work of your conscience, and there will be no end ... and to the horror of your torments there will never be an end ... never! THE DEVIL AND THE OLD MAN[31] BY JOHN MASEFIELD [31] From _A Mainsail Haul_, by John Masefield [Copyright 1913 by The Macmillan Company. Reprinted by permission of the Author and the Publishers.] Up away north, in the old days, in Chester, there was a man who never throve. Nothing he put his hand to ever prospered, and as his state worsened, his friends fell away, and he grew desperate. So one night when he was alone in his room, thinking of the rent due in two or three days and the money he couldn’t scrape together, he cried out, “I wish I could sell my soul to the devil like that man the old books tell about.” Now just as he spoke the clock struck twelve, and, while it chimed, a sparkle began to burn about the room, and the air, all at once, began to smell of brimstone, and a voice said: “Will these terms suit you?”