“You really cannot help doing ill?” asked the innkeeper.

“Not in the smallest,” said the devil; “it would be useless cruelty to thrash a thing like me.”

“It would indeed,” said the innkeeper.

And he made a noose and hanged the devil.

“There!” said the innkeeper.

VI.—THE PENITENT

A man met a lad weeping. “What do you weep for?” he asked.

“I am weeping for my sins,” said the lad.

“You must have little to do,” said the man.

The next day they met again. Once more the lad was weeping. “Why do you weep now?” asked the man.

“I am weeping because I have nothing to eat,” said the lad.

“I thought it would come to that,” said the man.

VII.—THE YELLOW PAINT.

In a certain city there lived a physician who sold yellow paint. This was of so singular a virtue that whoso was bedaubed with it from head to heel was set free from the dangers of life, and the bondage of sin, and the fear of death for ever. So the physician said in his prospectus; and so said all the citizens in the city; and there was nothing more urgent in men’s hearts than to be properly painted themselves, and nothing they took more delight in than to see others painted. There was in the same city a young man of a very good family but of a somewhat reckless life, who had reached the age of manhood, and would have nothing to say to the paint:  “To-morrow was soon enough,” said he; and when the morrow came he would still put it off. She might have continued to do until his death; only, he had a friend of about his own age and much of his own manners; and this youth, taking a walk in the public street, with not one fleck of paint upon his body, was suddenly run down by a water-cart and cut off in the heyday of his nakedness. This shook the other to the soul; so that I never beheld a man 

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