The Mysterious Stranger

The Mysterious Stranger is the story of the fantasy events and magical occurrences in a print shop in a castle in Austria in 1490. The story takes place during the Middle Ages, and its narrator is a young boy named Theodor Fischer.

One day they are sitting in their favorite place in the woods, when a youth strolling comes toward them and starts talking to the boys. He commands magic power and introduces himself as the nephew of the devil.

In the first moment the boys are scared of the stranger, whose name is Satan, but he assures them that his uncle is the only one in his family who has ever sinned. As Satan is able to tell a lot of great stories and can apparently do a lot of wonderful things, they stay with him.

After his appearance, strange things start to happen in Eseldorf. Many people are accused of being witches, and so are some of the people Satan helped.  Folks are very suspicious about things they can't explain.

Teaching the moral lessons of truth and purification in his novel The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain stimulates readers' soul-searching by using Satan's supernatural powers for demonstrating the negative implications of the moral sense from a new perspective.