"Couldn't you have done that up here?" cried Siebenkæs, and went down to him, and said, "We'll go as far as the gallows hill together." The sand-bath and reverberating furnace of a noble anger made all their emotions warmer to-day, just as a hot climate gives strength to poisons and spices. As the _first_ parting had caused their eyes to overflow, they had nothing more to keep in control but voice and language. "Are you sure you feel quite well after being so much vexed?" said Siebenkæs. "If the death of domestic animals portends the death of the master of the house, as the superstition runs," said Leibgeber, "I shall live to all eternity, for my menagerie[20] of beasts is all alive and kicking." At last they stopped at the market house, beside the place of execution. "Just up to the top," said Siebenkæs, "no further." When they came to the top of this boundary-hill of so many an unhappy life--and when Siebenkæs looked down upon the green spotted stone altar where so many an innocent sacrifice had been offered up, and thought, in that dark minute, of the heavy blood drops of agony, the burning tears which women who had killed their children[21] (and were themselves put to death by the state and their lovers) had let fall upon this their last and briefest rack of torture here in this field of blood--and as he gazed from this cloudbank of life out over the broad earth with the mists of night steaming up round its horizons and over all its streams--he took his friend's hand, and, looking to the free starry heaven, said, "The mists of our life on earth _must_ be resolved into stars, up there at last, as the mists of the milky way part into suns. Henry, don't you yet believe in the soul's immortality?"--"It will _not_ do yet, I can _not_," Leibgeber replied. "Blasius, now, hardly deserves to live _once_, let alone twice or several times. I sometimes can't help feeling as if a little piece of the other world had been _painted on_ to this, just to finish it off and make it complete, as I've sometimes seen subsidiary subjects introduced in fainter colours towards the edge of a picture, to make the principal subject stand out from the frame, and to give it unity of effect. But at this moment, human beings strike me as being like those crabs which priests used to fasten tapers to and set them crawling about churchyards, telling the people they were the souls of the departed. Just so do we, in a masquerade impersonation of immortal beings, crawl about over graves with our tapers of souls. Ten to one they go out at last." His friend fell on his heart, and said with vivid conviction, "We do _not_ go out! Farewell a thousand times. We shall meet where there is no parting. By my soul! we do _not_ go out. Farewell, farewell."