to make life amusing, and being under no sort of moral obligation to ingrates who have publicly held his name and character in abhorrence, he cheerfully abandons them to their wretched fate. He himself is humbled; let them taste of his bitterness, as they have shared in his prosperity, without any honest acknowledgment of his benefaction. He is still great enough to preserve his dignity; let them preserve their own as best they can. And this ought not to be a difficult business; for there are still a multitude of fools in the world, and any new noisy dogma is not more than twenty-four hours old before a million credulous heads believe it embodies the immanent truth of the universe. Such subtle wits as the theologians, and those whom they serve, can assuredly find a way out of the mire of misfortune, as the multitude is always hospitable to miracle workers, though deaf and blind to facts and truth. The Devil himself, however, has discovered the ironies of the ambition that can only prosper upon the folly of fools. He recognizes the omnipotence of his rivals, the omniscient journalists, in this vineyard, and is content to let them discover in due time that wisdom does not consist in the counting of noses, and that mere bawdy optimism brings its own dissatisfaction. And, moreover, in retiring, the Devil is sustained by the firm conviction that his old laborious schemes for the befuddlement and bewilderment and corruption of mankind will not only be ably continued, but improved and surpassed in subtlety and thoroughness by these audacious and unscrupulous successors. So his decision is irrevocable; he has abdicated forever. Emulation would but emphasize the futile and ludicrous pretensions of his old ingrate protegees, the theologians; and the Devil is not ungenerous, even in misfortune, even to those base hypocrites who have enjoyed his protection and reviled him. Then, retirement with dignity is better than embittered ambition and a fall without dignity. As he points out—and those who have known him in better days should assuredly sustain him in his noble and philosophic humility, so rare among the great of fallen fortunes—it is worse than useless for him to labor painfully to cultivate a deep and stirring delight in original sin in one promising little urchin, spending weary days and anxious and tender solicitude on the hard benches of the public schools, when the great and omniscient newspaper press can at any given moment set a whole nation, or even the whole civilized world, crawling upon all fours, nosing and wallowing in filth. Only a few aboriginal tribes escape, and the Devil does not deem these worthy of cultivation, since civilization is encroaching upon them and their days are already numbered.