Howling with pain, grinning with exultant fury, the crazy skeleton
sprang forth from behind the hill into the blessed plain, bearing in
its right hand a bloody hand that had been hewed off, and shook from
the left stump, from which its madness had hacked it off, trickling
fountain-curves of blood, and pressed to itself with the right arm a
spade, designed for the burying of the hand, and screamed with a grin
of exultation and agony: "Death grabbed me by it, but I snapped it
off,--and when he sees the grave of the fist, he will be so stupid as
to think it is I lying there ... Ah, thou there! Lay thyself, prithee,
to bed in the coffin; he has bored out thy eyes and clogged thy maw
with mould.... Brr!"
"O All-gracious One, thou hast damned me!" stammered Emanuel; the
driven blood broke from his crushed lung, and the disconsolate one
staggered and sank dying on the blood-stained flowers of his lost
heaven....
Thus does one day rob another of its heaven, and ere bereaved man
enters yonder into the last paradise, he has lost too many here
below!--Ah, we bear into every spring-air of this life and into the
ether of the second a breast yawning with wounds; and it must first be
closed, before it can fill itself!...