The priests and priestesses sang a chant of New Birth and Resurrection, burned incense compounded of rose-leaves and arsenic-acid, and danced a snake-dance, which they called "the joy of life." Then they began to quarrel about a laurel-wreath, and fought one another. As the teacher went, they all sat there in the darkness and wept. But when a fresh north wind blew through the temple, they trembled like dry leaves. =Blind and Deaf.=--The teacher said: "There are, as you know, people with whom one cannot be angry. Perhaps it is because of their natural good-nature, which shines even through a cutting jest. And there are people whose malice comes to light long after one has met them. Such an after-effect I have experienced myself. "Five-and-twenty years after a conversation with a man, I felt angry with him. Naturally, during a sleepless night, when memory threw a new light on the scene which had taken place between us. Not till then did the insulting word he spoke receive its proper signification, which I now understood. There are words which can murder. Such a word this one was. What a good thing that I did not understand it at the time! It would have resulted in calamity to four people. "By developing a peculiar instinct I have succeeded in fabricating a kind of diving-costume, with which I protect myself in society. When the insulting word or the biting allusion is uttered, the sound certainly reaches my ear, but the receptive apparatus refuses to let it go further. In the same way I can make myself literally blind. I obliterate the face of the person I dislike. How it is done, I do not know, but it seems to be a psychological process. The face becomes a dirty whitish-grey spot and disappears. It is necessary to make oneself deaf and blind, or it is impossible to live. "One must cancel and go on! That is generally called 'forgiving,' but it may be a device of the revengeful for sparing himself trouble, or a scheme of the sensitive for not letting insults reach him. One cannot undertake more than one can bear!" =The Disrobing Chamber.=--The teacher continued: "Swedenborg says in his _Inferno_...." "Say 'Hell,'" the pupil interrupted him. "I know that there is a hell, for I have been in it." "Well, Swedenborg has in his _Hell_ a disrobing chamber into which the deceased are conducted immediately after their death. There they lay aside the dress they have had to wear in society and in the family. Then the angels see at once whom they have before them." "Does Swedenborg then mean that we are all hypocrites?" "Yes, in a certain way. An inborn modesty compels us to conceal what has to do with the animal; politeness obliges us to be silent on many points. Consideration, friendship, kinship, love, oblige us to overlook our neighbour's weaknesses, although we disapprove them even in ourselves. A man who is ashamed of his faults is also silent about them. To boast of one's faults is shamelessness."