harm.'

'What have I said? I meant no harm; I repeated only what is the commonest
civility, the merest good manners.'

'You wished,' said the man who had struck me,--'I won't repeat the words:
to me, for it was I only that heard them, the awful company that hurts
most, that sets everything before us, both past and to come, and cuts
like a sword and burns like fire. I'll say it to yourself, and see how it
feels. God be with you! There! it is said, and we all must bear it,
thanks, you fool and accursed, to you.'

And then there came a pause over all the place, an awful
stillness,--hundreds of men and women standing clutching with desperate
movements at their hearts as if to tear them out, moving their heads as
if to dash them against the wall, wringing their hands, with a look upon
all their convulsed faces which I can never forget. They all turned to
me, cursing me with those horrible eyes of anguish. And everything was
still; the noise all stopped for a moment, the air all silent, with a
silence that could be felt. And then suddenly out of the crowd there came
a great piercing cry; and everything began again exactly as before.

While this pause occurred, and while I stood wondering, bewildered,
understanding nothing, there came over me a darkness, a blackness, a
sense of misery such as never in all my life--though I have known
troubles enough--I had felt before. All that had happened to me
throughout my existence seemed to rise pale and terrible in a hundred
scenes before me,--all momentary, intense, as if each was the present
moment. And in each of these scenes I saw what I had never seen before. I
saw where I had taken the wrong instead of the right step, in what
wantonness, with what self-will it had been done; how God (I shuddered at
the name) had spoken and called me, and even entreated, and I had
withstood and refused. All the evil I had done came back, and spread
itself out before my eyes; and I loathed it, yet knew that I had chosen
it, and that it would be with me forever. I saw it all in the twinkling
of an eye, in a moment, while I stood there, and all men with me, in the
horror of awful thought. Then it ceased as it had come, instantaneously,
and the noise and the laughter, and the quarrels and cries, and all the
commotion of this new bewildering place, in a moment began again. I had
seen no one while this strange paroxysm lasted. When it disappeared, I
came to myself, emerging as from a dream, and looked