At the graveyard the body of little Lisa was seized for debt by a
carpenter to whom the mother owed fifty groschen for work done the year
before. She had never been able to pay this, and was not able now. The
carpenter took the corpse home and kept it four days in his cellar, the
mother weeping and imploring about his house all the time; then he buried
it in his brother's cattle-yard, without religious ceremonies. It drove
the mother wild with grief and shame, and she forsook her work and went
daily about the town, cursing the carpenter and blaspheming the laws of
the emperor and the church, and it was pitiful to see. Seppi asked Satan
to interfere, but he said the carpenter and the rest were members of the
human race and were acting quite neatly for that species of animal. He
would interfere if he found a horse acting in such a way, and we must
inform him when we came across that kind of horse doing that kind of
human thing, so that he could stop it. We believed this was sarcasm, for
of course there wasn't any such horse.

But after a few days we found that we could not abide that poor woman's
distress, so we begged Satan to examine her several possible careers, and
see if he could not change her, to her profit, to a new one. He said the
longest of her careers as they now stood gave her forty-two years to
live, and her shortest one twenty-nine, and that both were charged with
grief and hunger and cold and pain. The only improvement he could make
would be to enable her to skip a certain three minutes from now; and he
asked us if he should do it. This was such a short time to decide in
that we went to pieces with nervous excitement, and before we could pull
ourselves together and ask for particulars he said the time would be up
in a few more seconds; so then we gasped out, "Do it!"

"It is done," he said; "she was going around a corner; I have turned her
back; it has changed her career."