Once, however, there was a catastrophe! It was caused by a herd of swine. Dreadful feet crashed through the heaven, stamped down the slime, bruised the corals, made havoc of the flowers, and plunged the entire little "world" back into chaos.
Some of the worms were asleep under the slime (and worms sleep fast and long).
These escaped.
When they rose out of the mud, the heavens had already swum together again and united; but whole heaps of squeezed, squashed, and suffocated worms were lying about unburied, witnesses in death of the past awful event!
"What has happened?" was the cry, and search was made for some living soul who should know the cause of the calamity.
But such a living soul was not easy to find!
It is no light thing to survive a heaven!
Those who were not stamped upon had died of fright, and those who were not killed by fright had died of a broken heart.
The remainder committed suicide. Without a heaven, what is life?
One had survived, but, when he had declared to them that the heaven they now saw was a new heaven, fresh, as it were, from the shop, and that the former heaven had been trodden in of beasts; when he asserted that a worm-heaven is not eternal—that only the universal heaven is, perhaps, eternal—then they saw clearly that his mind had become deranged.