Page:Et Cetera, a Collector's Scrap-Book (1924).djvu/186

 able to see even in the darkness, when everybody else is sleeping.

When the people of this city succumb to the night and consciousness vanishes, then the spectres of Sin and Greed leave their perches upon the pendulum of human hearts. These spectres are of a shimmering green; their outlines are dim and uncertain, and they are utterly hideous, for there is no love in the hearts of these human beings.

The people of the town are weary from their day's work, which they call duty, and so they seek to replenish their forces through sleep, in order to be able to destroy the happiness and prosperity of their fellow brethren—in order to plan new murders in the newest, freshest sunshine.

They sleep and they snore.

Then the shadows of the Sins and Lusts slip through the cracks in the doors and the crevices in the walls into the open air—slink into the vast and hearkening night. The sleeping animals scent them and start and whimper.

The shadows creep and dart into the old and gloomy house, into the mouldy cellar where lies the iron plate. And the iron is without weight when it is touched by the hands of these spirits. In its deepest profundities the shaft broadens out—it is there that the phantoms meet. They do not greet one another and they ask no questions—there is nothing which one would care to know about the other.