Read Online The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Literature) by Mark Twain - Free Book Online Page A

up the scaffoldings in pails on their heads, just as our
work-women have always done, and the men laying the courses of
masonry-five hundred of those toy people swarming briskly about
and working diligently and wiping the sweat off their faces as
natural as life. In the absorbing interest of watching those five
hundred little people make the castle grow step by step and course
by course and take shape and symmetry, that feeling of awe soon
passed away, and we were quite comfortable and at home again.
We asked if we might make some people, and he said yes, and told
Seppi to make some cannon for the walls, and told Nikolaus to
make some halberdiers with breastplates and greaves and helmets,
and I was to make some cavalry, with horses; and in allotting these
tasks he called us by our names, but did not say how he knew them.
Then Seppi asked him what his own name was, and he said
tranquilly-
    "Satan," and held out a chip and caught a little woman on it who
was falling from the scaffolding and put her back where she belonged, and said "she is an idiot to step backward like that and not
notice what she is about."
    It caught us suddenly, that name did, and our work dropped out
of our hands and broke to pieces-a cannon, a halberdier and a horse. Satan laughed, and asked what was the matter. It was a
natural laugh, and pleasant and sociable, not boisterous, and had a
reassuring influence upon us; so I said there was nothing much the
matter, only it seemed a strange name for an angel. He asked why.

    "Because its-its-well, it's his name, you know."
    "Yes-he is my uncle."
    He said it placidly, but it took our breath, for a moment, and
made our hearts beat hard. He did not seem to notice that, but
partly mended our halberdiers and things with a touch, handed
them to us to finish, and said-
    "Don't you remember?-he was an angel himself once."
    "Yes-it's true," said Seppi, "I didn't think of that."
    "Before the Fall he was blameless."
    "Yes," said Nikolaus, "he was without sin."
    "It is a good family-ours," said Satan; "there is not a better. He
is the only member of it that has ever sinned."
    I should not be able to make any one understand how exciting it
all was. You know that kind of quiver that trembles around through
you when you are seeing something that is so strange and enchanting and wonderful that it is just a fearful joy to be alive and look at
it; and you know how you gaze, and your lips turn dry and your
breath comes short, but you wouldn't be anywhere but there, not
for the world. I was bursting to ask one questionI had it on my
tongue's end and could hardly hold it back-but I was ashamed to
ask it, it might be a rudeness. Satan set an ox down that he had
been making, and smiled up at me and said-
    "It wouldn't be a rudeness; and I should forgive it if it was. Have
I seen him? Millions of times. From the time that I was a little child
a thousand years old I was his second-best favorite among the
nursery-angels of our blood and lineage-to use a human phraseyes, from that time till the Fall; eight thousand years, measured as
you count time."
    "Eight-thousand?"
    "Yes." He turned to Seppi, and went on as if answering something that was in Seppi's mind, "Why, naturally I look like a boy,
for that is what I am. With us, what you call time is a spacious thing; it takes a long stretch of it to grow an angel to full age."
There was a question in my mind, and he turned to me and
answered it: "I am sixteen thousand years old-counting as you
count." Then he turned to Nikolaus and said, "No, the Fall did not
affect me nor the rest of the relationship. It was only he that I was
named for who ate of the fruit of the tree and then beguiled the
man and the woman with it. We others are still ignorant of sin; we
are not able to commit it; we are without blemish, and shall abide
in that estate always. We-" Two of the little workmen were
quarreling, and in buzzing little bumble-bee voices they were