A great stillness had brooded over hell for some time, while the pains grew far more unbearable by being given no vent. But now the silence which Lucifer had enjoined was broken, when the fierce butchers, like bears maddened by hunger, fell upon their captives; then there arose such doleful cries, such dismal howling, from every quarter, louder than the roar of rushing torrents, than the rumble of an earthquake, till hell itself became ten times more horrible. I would have died, had not my friend saved me. “Quaff deep this time,” said he, “to give thee strength to behold things yet more dire.” Hardly were the words from his lips, when lo! heavenly Justice, who sits above the abyss, guardian of the gates of Hell, advanced scourging three men with rods of fiery scorpions. “Ha ha,” cried Lucifer, “here are three reverend gentlemen whom Justice thought worthy himself to conduct to my kingdom.” “Woe’s me,” said one of the three, “who ever wanted him to take the trouble?” “That matters not,” answered he, with a look that made the fiends wax pale, and tremble so that they knocked one against the other, “it was the will of the Infinite Creator that I myself should lead to their home such accursed murderers.” “Sirrah,”—addressing one of the demons,—“open me the fold of the assassins, where Cain, Nero, Bradshaw, Bonner, Ignatius and innumerable others like them dwell.” “Alack, alack! we have never slain any man,” cried one. “No thanks to you that you did not, for time only was wanting,” said Justice. When the den was opened, there came out such a hideous blast of blood-red flames, and such a shriek as if a thousand dragons were uttering their death-wail. As Justice was passing by on his return, in an instant he caused such a tempest of fiery whirlwinds to fall upon the Evil One and his princes that Lucifer was swept away, and with him Beelzebub, Satan, Moloch, Abadon, Asmodai, Dagon, Apolyon, Belphegor, Mephistopheles, and all their compeers, and they were hurled headlong into a whirlpool which opened and closed in the centre of the court and which, both in aspect and in the execrable stench that arose from it, was a hundredfold more foul and horrid than anything I had ever seen. Before I could ask aught, quoth the Angel: “This is the gulf that reaches to another great world.” “What, pray, is that world called?” I enquired. “’Tis called the bottomless pit or the Nethermost Hell, the home of the devils, whither they now have gone. And those vast, dreary wilds, parts of which thou hast traversed, are called the Region of Despair, ordained for the condemned until the Judgment Day; then it will become one with the utmost, bottomless Hell; then will one of us come and seal up the devils and the damned together, never more to open upon them, never to all eternity. In the meantime they have leave to come to this colder country to torment lost souls. Yea, often are they suffered to