But I was stronger than he and very angry. In a few minutes he was lying face downward with his hands behind his head and a rattling in his throat. Alarmed, I tried to help him up, but he thrust me away with his hands and feet. I grew still more alarmed. I went away to one side, not knowing what else to do, and he raised his head and said: "Do you know what you have brought on yourself? I will work things so that when the master and mistress are not looking I shall have to complain of you, and then they will dismiss you." He went on scolding and threatening me, and his words infuriated me. I rushed to the cave, took away the stones, and threw the coffin containing the sparrow over the fence into the street. I dug Out all the inside of the cave and trampled it under my feet. Sascha took my violence strangely. Sitting on the ground, with his mouth partly covered and his eyebrows drawn together, he watched me, saying nothing. When I had finished, he stood up without any hurry, shook out his clothes, threw on his coat, and then said calmly and ominously: "Now you will see what will happen; just wait a little! I arranged all this for you purposely; it is witchcraft. Aha!" I sank down as if his words had physically hurt me, and I felt quite cold inside. But he went away without glancing back at me, which accentuated his calmness still more. I made up my mind to run away from the town the next day, to run away from my master, from Sascha with his witchcraft, from the whole of that worthless, foolish life. The next morning the new cook cried out when she called me: "Good gracious! what have you been doing to your face?" "The witchcraft is beginning to take effect," I thought, with a sinking heart. But the cook laughed so heartily that I also smiled involuntarily, and peeped into her glass. My face was thickly smeared with soot. "Sascha did this?" I asked. "Or I," laughed the cook. When I began to clean the boots, the first boot into which I put my hand had a pin in the lining, which ran into my finger. "This is his witchcraft!" There were pins or needles in all the boots, put in so skilfully that they always pricked my palm. Then I took a bowl of cold water, and with great pleasure poured it over the head of the wizard, who was either not awake or was pretending to sleep. But all the same I was miserable. I was always thinking of the coffin containing the sparrow, with its gray crooked claws and its waxen bill pathetically sticking upward, and all around the colored gleams which seemed to be trying unsuccessfully to form themselves into a rainbow. In my imagination the coffin was enlarged, the claws of the bird grew, stretched upward quivering, were alive.