We believed this was sarcasm, for of course there wasn't any such horse.
But after a few days we found that we could not abide that poor woman's distress, so we begged Satan to examine her several possible careers, and see if he could not change her, to her profit, to a new one.

He said the longest of her careers as they now stood gave her forty-two years to live, and her shortest one twenty-nine, and that both were charged with grief and hunger and cold and pain.

The only improvement he could make would be to enable her to skip a certain three minutes from now; and he asked us if he should do it.

This was such a short time to decide in that we went to pieces with nervous excitement, and before we could pull ourselves together and ask for particulars he said the time would be up in a few more seconds; so then we gasped out, "Do it!" "It is done," he said; "she was going around a corner; I have turned her back; it has changed her career." "Then what will happen, Satan ?" "It is happening now.

She is having words with Fischer, the weaver.