great boxes lay all open to the air, and one of them would be suddenly
closed up, and my fearful strength would be set on him like accurse, and
if his timbers groaned when first I seized them, or if they creaked aloud
in the lonely night, thinking of woodlands out of which they came, then I
only gripped them tighter still, for the poor useless hate is in my soul
of those that made me in the place of doom. Yet, for all the things that
my prison-clutch has held, the last work that I did was to set something
free. I lay idle one night in the gloom on the warehouse floor. Nothing
stirred there, and even the spider slept. Towards midnight a great flock
of echoes suddenly leapt up from the wooden planks and circled round the
roof. A man was coming towards me all alone. And as he came his soul was
reproaching him, and I saw that there was a great trouble between the man
and his soul, for his soul would not let him be, but went on reproaching
him.

"Then the man saw me and said, 'This at least will not fail me.' When I
heard him say this about me, I determined that whatever he might require
of me it should be done to the uttermost. And as I made this determination
in my unfaltering heart, he picked me up and stood on an empty box that I
should have bound on the morrow, and tied one end of me to a dark rafter;
and the knot was carelessly tied, because his soul was reproaching him all
the while continually and giving him no ease. Then he made the other end
of me into a noose, but when the man's soul saw this it stopped
reproaching the man, and cried out to him hurriedly, and besought him to
be at peace with it and to do nothing sudden; but the man went on with his
work, and put the noose down over his face and underneath his chin, and
the soul screamed horribly.

"Then the man kicked the box away with his foot, and the moment he did
this I knew that my strength was not great enough to hold him; but I