As an eye-witness, I can testify that in the same moment that he uttered these words he turned pale, stood up from the table, and with a gesture of disgust pointed to something on his plate. It was a white maggot crawling along a sardine. The next day my friend is obliged to break off his evening meal because he finds a piece of chicken surrounded by white maggots. He cannot eat although he is ravenously hungry, and becomes alarmed, but only for a moment. "What does it mean? What does it mean?" he says. "One should not speak ill of the dead. They revenge themselves." "The dead? But they are dead!" "Exactly. And therefore they are more alive than the living." My friend had, as a matter of fact, accustomed himself to speak openly of the weaknesses of the deceased, who, in spite of all, had been a good friend to him. Some days later, as we sat at table in the verandah of a garden-restaurant, one of the guests exclaimed, "Look at that rat! What a big fellow!" No one had seen it, and they laughed at the visionary. "Wait a minute!" he said, "you will soon see. It is there under the planks!" A minute passed, and a cat came from under the planks. "I think we have had enough of rats," my friend exclaimed, apparently much disturbed. After some time has elapsed, one evening I hear a knock at my door after I have gone to bed. I open it, and find myself face to face with my friend, who looks disturbed and excited. He asks to be allowed to stay and rest on a sofa, because there is a woman who screams the whole night in the house where he lives. "Is it a real woman, or a spectre?" "Oh, it is a woman with cancer, who only wants to be able to die. It is enough to drive one mad. If I don't end my days in an asylum, it will be strange." There is only a short sofa, and to see the tall man stretched out on such a thing, and two chairs placed by it, is as though one saw a slave on the rack. Hunted out of his pleasant house, and his comfortable bed, deprived of the simple pleasure of being able to undress himself, he rouses my sympathy and I offer him my bed as a sign of my gratitude. But he refuses. He asks to have the lamp lit, and the light falls straight on the unfortunate man's face. He fears the dark and I promise to sit up and watch. He lies and murmurs to himself till sleep has pity on him. "There is no doubt it is a sick woman, but still it is strange." For two whole weeks he is obliged to seek rest on other people's sofas. "This is really hell!" he exclaims. "Just what I think" is my answer.