kick, which shot him through space like a cannon-ball.

He shot through the air like a javelin and fell heavily before the
town of Mortain. His horns and claws stuck deep into the rock, which
keeps through eternity the traces of this fall of Satan.

He stood up again, limping, crippled until the end of time, and as he
looked at this fatal castle in the distance, standing out against the
setting sun, he understood well that he would always be vanquished in
this unequal struggle, and he went away limping, heading for distant
countries, leaving to his enemy his fields, his hills, his valleys and
his marshes.

And this is how Saint Michael, the patron saint of Normandy,
vanquished the devil.

Another people would have dreamed of this battle in an entirely
different manner.

THE DEMON POPE[26]

BY RICHARD GARNETT

[26] Taken by permission from _The Twilight of the Gods_, by
Richard Garnett. Published by John Lane Co., New York.

"So you won't sell me your soul?" said the devil.

"Thank you," replied the student, "I had rather keep it myself, if
it's all the same to you."

"But it's not all the same to me. I want it very particularly. Come,
I'll be liberal. I said twenty years. You can have thirty."

The student shook his head.

"Forty!"

Another shake.

"Fifty!"

As before.

"Now," said the devil. "I know I'm going to do a foolish thing, but I
cannot bear to see a clever, spirited young man throw himself away.
I'll make you another kind of offer. We don't have any bargain at
present, but I will push you on in the world for the next forty years.
This day forty years I come back and ask you for a boon; not your
soul, mind, or anything not perfectly in your power to grant. If you
give it, we are quits; if not, I fly away with you. What say you to
this?"

The student reflected for some minutes. "Agreed," he said at last.

Scarcely had the devil disappeared, which he did instantaneously, ere
a messenger reined in his smoking steed at the gate of the University
of Cordova (the judicious reader will already have remarked that
Lucifer could never have been allowed inside a Christian seat of
learning), and, inquiring for the student Gerbert, presented him with
the Emperor Otho's nomination to the Abbacy of Bobbio, in
consideration, said the document, of his virtue and learning, wellnigh
miraculous in one so young. Such messengers were frequent visitors
during Gerbert's prosperous career. Abb