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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to
+Heaven, by Mark Twain, Illustrated by Albert Levering
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven
+
+
+Author: Mark Twain
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 14, 2013  [eBook #1044]
+[This file was first posted on September 26, 1997]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXTRACT FROM CAPTAIN STORMFIELD'S
+VISIT TO HEAVEN***
+
+
+Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+                          [Picture: Book cover]
+
+
+
+
+
+                               Extract from
+                           Captain Stormfield’s
+                             Visit to Heaven
+
+
+                                    BY
+                                Mark Twain
+
+                      [Picture: Decorative graphic]
+
+                           NEW YORK AND LONDON
+                            HARPER & BROTHERS
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                  Copyright, 1909, by MARK TWAIN COMPANY
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                _Printed in the United States of America_
+
+                      [Picture: Captain Stormfield]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Well, when I had been dead about thirty years I begun to get a little
+anxious.  Mind you, had been whizzing through space all that time, like a
+comet.  _Like_ a comet!  Why, Peters, I laid over the lot of them!  Of
+course there warn’t any of them going my way, as a steady thing, you
+know, because they travel in a long circle like the loop of a lasso,
+whereas I was pointed as straight as a dart for the Hereafter; but I
+happened on one every now and then that was going my way for an hour or
+so, and then we had a bit of a brush together.  But it was generally
+pretty one-sided, because I sailed by them the same as if they were
+standing still.  An ordinary comet don’t make more than about 200,000
+miles a minute.  Of course when I came across one of that sort—like
+Encke’s and Halley’s comets, for instance—it warn’t anything but just a
+flash and a vanish, you see.  You couldn’t rightly call it a race.  It
+was as if the comet was a gravel-train and I was a telegraph despatch.
+But after I got outside of our astronomical system, I used to flush a
+comet occasionally that was something _like_.  _We_ haven’t got any such
+comets—ours don’t begin.  One night I was swinging along at a good round
+gait, everything taut and trim, and the wind in my favor—I judged I was
+going about a million miles a minute—it might have been more, it couldn’t
+have been less—when I flushed a most uncommonly big one about three
+points off my starboard bow.  By his stern lights I judged he was bearing
+about northeast-and-by-north-half-east.  Well, it was so near my course
+that I wouldn’t throw away the chance; so I fell off a point, steadied my
+helm, and went for him.  You should have heard me whiz, and seen the
+electric fur fly!  In about a minute and a half I was fringed out with an
+electrical nimbus that flamed around for miles and miles and lit up all
+space like broad day.  The comet was burning blue in the distance, like a
+sickly torch, when I first sighted him, but he begun to grow bigger and
+bigger as I crept up on him.  I slipped up on him so fast that when I had
+gone about 150,000,000 miles I was close enough to be swallowed up in the
+phosphorescent glory of his wake, and I couldn’t see anything for the
+glare.  Thinks I, it won’t do to run into him, so I shunted to one side
+and tore along.  By and by I closed up abreast of his tail.  Do you know
+what it was like?  It was like a gnat closing up on the continent of
+America.  I forged along.  By and by I had sailed along his coast for a
+little upwards of a hundred and fifty million miles, and then I could see
+by the shape of him that I hadn’t even got up to his waistband yet.  Why,
+Peters, _we_ don’t know anything about comets, down here.  If you want to
+see comets that _are_ comets, you’ve got to go outside of our solar
+system—where there’s room for them, you understand.  My friend, I’ve seen
+comets out there that couldn’t even lay down inside the _orbits_ of our
+noblest comets without their tails hanging over.
+
+Well, I boomed along another hundred and fifty million miles, and got up
+abreast his shoulder, as you may say.  I was feeling pretty fine, I tell
+you; but just then I noticed the officer of the deck come to the side and
+hoist his glass in my direction.  Straight off I heard him sing
+out—“Below there, ahoy!  Shake her up, shake her up!  Heave on a hundred
+million billion tons of brimstone!”
+
+“Ay-ay, sir!”
+
+“Pipe the stabboard watch!  All hands on deck!”
+
+“Ay-ay, sir!”
+
+“Send two hundred thousand million men aloft to shake out royals and
+sky-scrapers!”
+
+“Ay-ay, sir!”
+
+“Hand the stuns’ls!  Hang out every rag you’ve got!  Clothe her from stem
+to rudder-post!”
+
+“Ay-ay, sir!”
+
+In about a second I begun to see I’d woke up a pretty ugly customer,
+Peters.  In less than ten seconds that comet was just a blazing cloud of
+red-hot canvas.  It was piled up into the heavens clean out of sight—the
+old thing seemed to swell out and occupy all space; the sulphur smoke
+from the furnaces—oh, well, nobody can describe the way it rolled and
+tumbled up into the skies, and nobody can half describe the way it smelt.
+Neither can anybody begin to describe the way that monstrous craft begun
+to crash along.  And such another powwow—thousands of bo’s’n’s whistles
+screaming at once, and a crew like the populations of a hundred thousand
+worlds like ours all swearing at once.  Well, I never heard the like of
+it before.
+
+We roared and thundered along side by side, both doing our level best,
+because I’d never struck a comet before that could lay over me, and so I
+was bound to beat this one or break something.  I judged I had some
+reputation in space, and I calculated to keep it.  I noticed I wasn’t
+gaining as fast, now, as I was before, but still I was gaining.  There
+was a power of excitement on board the comet.  Upwards of a hundred
+billion passengers swarmed up from below and rushed to the side and begun
+to bet on the race.  Of course this careened her and damaged her speed.
+My, but wasn’t the mate mad!  He jumped at that crowd, with his trumpet
+in his hand, and sung out—
+
+“Amidships! amidships, you—! {9} or I’ll brain the last idiot of you!”
+
+Well, sir, I gained and gained, little by little, till at last I went
+skimming sweetly by the magnificent old conflagration’s nose.  By this
+time the captain of the comet had been rousted out, and he stood there in
+the red glare for’ard, by the mate, in his shirt-sleeves and slippers,
+his hair all rats’ nests and one suspender hanging, and how sick those
+two men did look!  I just simply couldn’t help putting my thumb to my
+nose as I glided away and singing out:
+
+“Ta-ta! ta-ta!  Any word to send to your family?”
+
+Peters, it was a mistake.  Yes, sir, I’ve often regretted that—it was a
+mistake.  You see, the captain had given up the race, but that remark was
+too tedious for him—he couldn’t stand it.  He turned to the mate, and
+says he—
+
+“Have we got brimstone enough of our own to make the trip?”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“Sure?”
+
+“Yes, sir—more than enough.”
+
+“How much have we got in cargo for Satan?”
+
+“Eighteen hundred thousand billion quintillions of kazarks.”
+
+“Very well, then, let his boarders freeze till the next comet comes.
+Lighten ship!  Lively, now, lively, men!  Heave the whole cargo
+overboard!”
+
+Peters, look me in the eye, and be calm.  I found out, over there, that a
+kazark is exactly the bulk of a _hundred and sixty-nine worlds like
+ours_!  They hove all that load overboard.  When it fell it wiped out a
+considerable raft of stars just as clean as if they’d been candles and
+somebody blowed them out.  As for the race, that was at an end.  The
+minute she was lightened the comet swung along by me the same as if I was
+anchored.  The captain stood on the stern, by the after-davits, and put
+his thumb to his nose and sung out—
+
+“Ta-ta! ta-ta!  Maybe _you’ve_ got some message to send your friends in
+the Everlasting Tropics!”
+
+Then he hove up his other suspender and started for’ard, and inside of
+three-quarters of an hour his craft was only a pale torch again in the
+distance.  Yes, it was a mistake, Peters—that remark of mine.  I don’t
+reckon I’ll ever get over being sorry about it.  I’d ’a’ beat the bully
+of the firmament if I’d kept my mouth shut.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+But I’ve wandered a little off the track of my tale; I’ll get back on my
+course again.  Now you see what kind of speed I was making.  So, as I
+said, when I had been tearing along this way about thirty years I begun
+to get uneasy.  Oh, it was pleasant enough, with a good deal to find out,
+but then it was kind of lonesome, you know.  Besides, I wanted to get
+somewhere.  I hadn’t shipped with the idea of cruising forever.  First
+off, I liked the delay, because I judged I was going to fetch up in
+pretty warm quarters when I got through; but towards the last I begun to
+feel that I’d rather go to—well, most any place, so as to finish up the
+uncertainty.
+
+Well, one night—it was always night, except when I was rushing by some
+star that was occupying the whole universe with its fire and its
+glare—light enough then, of course, but I necessarily left it behind in a
+minute or two and plunged into a solid week of darkness again.  The stars
+ain’t so close together as they look to be.  Where was I?  Oh yes; one
+night I was sailing along, when I discovered a tremendous long row of
+blinking lights away on the horizon ahead.  As I approached, they begun
+to tower and swell and look like mighty furnaces.  Says I to myself—
+
+“By George, I’ve arrived at last—and at the wrong place, just as I
+expected!”
+
+Then I fainted.  I don’t know how long I was insensible, but it must have
+been a good while, for, when I came to, the darkness was all gone and
+there was the loveliest sunshine and the balmiest, fragrantest air in its
+place.  And there was such a marvellous world spread out before me—such a
+glowing, beautiful, bewitching country.  The things I took for furnaces
+were gates, miles high, made all of flashing jewels, and they pierced a
+wall of solid gold that you couldn’t see the top of, nor yet the end of,
+in either direction.  I was pointed straight for one of these gates, and
+a-coming like a house afire.  Now I noticed that the skies were black
+with millions of people, pointed for those gates.  What a roar they made,
+rushing through the air!  The ground was as thick as ants with people,
+too—billions of them, I judge.
+
+I lit.  I drifted up to a gate with a swarm of people, and when it was my
+turn the head clerk says, in a business-like way—
+
+“Well, quick!  Where are you from?”
+
+“San Francisco,” says I.
+
+“San Fran—_what_?” says he.
+
+“San Francisco.”
+
+He scratched his head and looked puzzled, then he says—
+
+“Is it a planet?”
+
+By George, Peters, think of it!  “_Planet_?” says I; “it’s a city.  And
+moreover, it’s one of the biggest and finest and—”
+
+“There, there!” says he, “no time here for conversation.  We don’t deal
+in cities here.  Where are you from in a _general_ way?”
+
+“Oh,” I says, “I beg your pardon.  Put me down for California.”
+
+I had him _again_, Peters!  He puzzled a second, then he says, sharp and
+irritable—
+
+“I don’t know any such planet—is it a constellation?”
+
+“Oh, my goodness!” says I.  “Constellation, says you?  No—it’s a State.”
+
+“Man, we don’t deal in States here.  _Will_ you tell me where you are
+from _in general—at large_, don’t you understand?”
+
+“Oh, now I get your idea,” I says.  “I’m from America,—the United States
+of America.”
+
+Peters, do you know I had him _again_?  If I hadn’t I’m a clam!  His face
+was as blank as a target after a militia shooting-match.  He turned to an
+under clerk and says—
+
+“Where is America?  _What_ is America?”
+
+The under clerk answered up prompt and says—
+
+“There ain’t any such orb.”
+
+“_Orb_?” says I.  “Why, what are you talking about, young man?  It ain’t
+an orb; it’s a country; it’s a continent.  Columbus discovered it; I
+reckon likely you’ve heard of _him_, anyway.  America—why, sir, America—”
+
+“Silence!” says the head clerk.  “Once for all, where—are—you—_from_?”
+
+“Well,” says I, “I don’t know anything more to say—unless I lump things,
+and just say I’m from the world.”
+
+“Ah,” says he, brightening up, “now that’s something like!  _What_
+world?”
+
+Peters, he had _me_, that time.  I looked at him, puzzled, he looked at
+me, worried.  Then he burst out—
+
+“Come, come, what world?”
+
+Says I, “Why, _the_ world, of course.”
+
+“_The_ world!” he says.  “H’m! there’s billions of them! . . . Next!”
+
+That meant for me to stand aside.  I done so, and a sky-blue man with
+seven heads and only one leg hopped into my place.  I took a walk.  It
+just occurred to me, then, that all the myriads I had seen swarming to
+that gate, up to this time, were just like that creature.  I tried to run
+across somebody I was acquainted with, but they were out of acquaintances
+of mine just then.  So I thought the thing all over and finally sidled
+back there pretty meek and feeling rather stumped, as you may say.
+
+“Well?” said the head clerk.
+
+“Well, sir,” I says, pretty humble, “I don’t seem to make out which world
+it is I’m from.  But you may know it from this—it’s the one the Saviour
+saved.”
+
+He bent his head at the Name.  Then he says, gently—
+
+“The worlds He has saved are like to the gates of heaven in number—none
+can count them.  What astronomical system is your world in?—perhaps that
+may assist.”
+
+“It’s the one that has the sun in it—and the moon—and Mars”—he shook his
+head at each name—hadn’t ever heard of them, you see—“and Neptune—and
+Uranus—and Jupiter—”
+
+“Hold on!” says he—“hold on a minute!  Jupiter . . . Jupiter . . . Seems
+to me we had a man from there eight or nine hundred years ago—but people
+from that system very seldom enter by this gate.”  All of a sudden he
+begun to look me so straight in the eye that I thought he was going to
+bore through me.  Then he says, very deliberate, “Did you come _straight
+here_ from your system?”
+
+“Yes, sir,” I says—but I blushed the least little bit in the world when I
+said it.
+
+He looked at me very stern, and says—
+
+“That is not true; and this is not the place for prevarication.  You
+wandered from your course.  How did that happen?”
+
+Says I, blushing again—
+
+“I’m sorry, and I take back what I said, and confess.  I raced a little
+with a comet one day—only just the least little bit—only the tiniest
+lit—”
+
+“So—so,” says he—and without any sugar in his voice to speak of.
+
+I went on, and says—
+
+“But I only fell off just a bare point, and I went right back on my
+course again the minute the race was over.”
+
+“No matter—that divergence has made all this trouble.  It has brought you
+to a gate that is billions of leagues from the right one.  If you had
+gone to your own gate they would have known all about your world at once
+and there would have been no delay.  But we will try to accommodate you.”
+He turned to an under clerk and says—
+
+“What system is Jupiter in?”
+
+“I don’t remember, sir, but I think there is such a planet in one of the
+little new systems away out in one of the thinly worlded corners of the
+universe.  I will see.”
+
+He got a balloon and sailed up and up and up, in front of a map that was
+as big as Rhode Island.  He went on up till he was out of sight, and by
+and by he came down and got something to eat and went up again.  To cut a
+long story short, he kept on doing this for a day or two, and finally he
+came down and said he thought he had found that solar system, but it
+might be fly-specks.  So he got a microscope and went back.  It turned
+out better than he feared.  He had rousted out our system, sure enough.
+He got me to describe our planet and its distance from the sun, and then
+he says to his chief—
+
+“Oh, I know the one he means, now, sir.  It is on the map.  It is called
+the Wart.”
+
+Says I to myself, “Young man, it wouldn’t be wholesome for you to go down
+_there_ and call it the Wart.”
+
+Well, they let me in, then, and told me I was safe forever and wouldn’t
+have any more trouble.
+
+Then they turned from me and went on with their work, the same as if they
+considered my case all complete and shipshape.  I was a good deal
+surprised at this, but I was diffident about speaking up and reminding
+them.  I did so hate to do it, you know; it seemed a pity to bother them,
+they had so much on their hands.  Twice I thought I would give up and let
+the thing go; so twice I started to leave, but immediately I thought what
+a figure I should cut stepping out amongst the redeemed in such a rig,
+and that made me hang back and come to anchor again.  People got to eying
+me—clerks, you know—wondering why I didn’t get under way.  I couldn’t
+stand this long—it was too uncomfortable.  So at last I plucked up
+courage and tipped the head clerk a signal.  He says—
+
+“What! you here yet?  What’s wanting?”
+
+Says I, in a low voice and very confidential, making a trumpet with my
+hands at his ear—
+
+“I beg pardon, and you mustn’t mind my reminding you, and seeming to
+meddle, but hain’t you forgot something?”
+
+He studied a second, and says—
+
+“Forgot something? . . . No, not that I know of.”
+
+“Think,” says I.
+
+He thought.  Then he says—
+
+“No, I can’t seem to have forgot anything.  What is it?”
+
+“Look at me,” says I, “look me all over.”
+
+He done it.
+
+“Well?” says he.
+
+“Well,” says I, “you don’t notice anything?  If I branched out amongst
+the elect looking like this, wouldn’t I attract considerable
+attention?—wouldn’t I be a little conspicuous?”
+
+“Well,” he says, “I don’t see anything the matter.  What do you lack?”
+
+“Lack!  Why, I lack my harp, and my wreath, and my halo, and my
+hymn-book, and my palm branch—I lack everything that a body naturally
+requires up here, my friend.”
+
+Puzzled?  Peters, he was the worst puzzled man you ever saw.  Finally he
+says—
+
+“Well, you seem to be a curiosity every way a body takes you.  I never
+heard of these things before.”
+
+I looked at the man awhile in solid astonishment; then I says—
+
+“Now, I hope you don’t take it as an offence, for I don’t mean any, but
+really, for a man that has been in the Kingdom as long as I reckon you
+have, you do seem to know powerful little about its customs.”
+
+“Its customs!” says he.  “Heaven is a large place, good friend.  Large
+empires have many and diverse customs.  Even small dominions have, as you
+doubtless know by what you have seen of the matter on a small scale in
+the Wart.  How can you imagine I could ever learn the varied customs of
+the countless kingdoms of heaven?  It makes my head ache to think of it.
+I know the customs that prevail in those portions inhabited by peoples
+that are appointed to enter by my own gate—and hark ye, that is quite
+enough knowledge for one individual to try to pack into his head in the
+thirty-seven millions of years I have devoted night and day to that
+study.  But the idea of learning the customs of the whole appalling
+expanse of heaven—O man, how insanely you talk!  Now I don’t doubt that
+this odd costume you talk about is the fashion in that district of heaven
+you belong to, but you won’t be conspicuous in this section without it.”
+
+I felt all right, if that was the case, so I bade him good-day and left.
+All day I walked towards the far end of a prodigious hall of the office,
+hoping to come out into heaven any moment, but it was a mistake.  That
+hall was built on the general heavenly plan—it naturally couldn’t be
+small.  At last I got so tired I couldn’t go any farther; so I sat down
+to rest, and begun to tackle the queerest sort of strangers and ask for
+information, but I didn’t get any; they couldn’t understand my language,
+and I could not understand theirs.  I got dreadfully lonesome.  I was so
+down-hearted and homesick I wished a hundred times I never had died.  I
+turned back, of course.  About noon next day, I got back at last and was
+on hand at the booking-office once more.  Says I to the head clerk—
+
+“I begin to see that a man’s got to be in his own Heaven to be happy.”
+
+“Perfectly correct,” says he.  “Did you imagine the same heaven would
+suit all sorts of men?”
+
+“Well, I had that idea—but I see the foolishness of it.  Which way am I
+to go to get to my district?”
+
+He called the under clerk that had examined the map, and he gave me
+general directions.  I thanked him and started; but he says—
+
+“Wait a minute; it is millions of leagues from here.  Go outside and
+stand on that red wishing-carpet; shut your eyes, hold your breath, and
+wish yourself there.”
+
+“I’m much obliged,” says I; “why didn’t you dart me through when I first
+arrived?”
+
+“We have a good deal to think of here; it was your place to think of it
+and ask for it.  Good-by; we probably sha’n’t see you in this region for
+a thousand centuries or so.”
+
+“In that case, _o revoor_,” says I.
+
+I hopped onto the carpet and held my breath and shut my eyes and wished I
+was in the booking-office of my own section.  The very next instant a
+voice I knew sung out in a business kind of a way—
+
+“A harp and a hymn-book, pair of wings and a halo, size 13, for Cap’n Eli
+Stormfield, of San Francisco!—make him out a clean bill of health, and
+let him in.”
+
+I opened my eyes.  Sure enough, it was a Pi Ute Injun I used to know in
+Tulare County; mighty good fellow—I remembered being at his funeral,
+which consisted of him being burnt and the other Injuns gauming their
+faces with his ashes and howling like wildcats.  He was powerful glad to
+see me, and you may make up your mind I was just as glad to see him, and
+feel that I was in the right kind of a heaven at last.
+
+Just as far as your eye could reach, there was swarms of clerks, running
+and bustling around, tricking out thousands of Yanks and Mexicans and
+English and Arabs, and all sorts of people in their new outfits; and when
+they gave me my kit and I put on my halo and took a look in the glass, I
+could have jumped over a house for joy, I was so happy.  “Now _this_ is
+something like!” says I.  “Now,” says I, “I’m all right—show me a cloud.”
+
+Inside of fifteen minutes I was a mile on my way towards the cloud-banks
+and about a million people along with me.  Most of us tried to fly, but
+some got crippled and nobody made a success of it.  So we concluded to
+walk, for the present, till we had had some wing practice.
+
+We begun to meet swarms of folks who were coming back.  Some had harps
+and nothing else; some had hymn-books and nothing else; some had nothing
+at all; all of them looked meek and uncomfortable; one young fellow
+hadn’t anything left but his halo, and he was carrying that in his hand;
+all of a sudden he offered it to me and says—
+
+“Will you hold it for me a minute?”
+
+Then he disappeared in the crowd.  I went on.  A woman asked me to hold
+her palm branch, and then _she_ disappeared.  A girl got me to hold her
+harp for her, and by George, _she_ disappeared; and so on and so on, till
+I was about loaded down to the guards.  Then comes a smiling old
+gentleman and asked me to hold _his_ things.  I swabbed off the
+perspiration and says, pretty tart—
+
+“I’ll have to get you to excuse me, my friend,—_I_ ain’t no hat-rack.”
+
+About this time I begun to run across piles of those traps, lying in the
+road.  I just quietly dumped my extra cargo along with them.  I looked
+around, and, Peters, that whole nation that was following me were loaded
+down the same as I’d been.  The return crowd had got them to hold their
+things a minute, you see.  They all dumped their loads, too, and we went
+on.
+
+When I found myself perched on a cloud, with a million other people, I
+never felt so good in my life.  Says I, “Now this is according to the
+promises; I’ve been having my doubts, but now I am in heaven, sure
+enough.”  I gave my palm branch a wave or two, for luck, and then I
+tautened up my harp-strings and struck in.  Well, Peters, you can’t
+imagine anything like the row we made.  It was grand to listen to, and
+made a body thrill all over, but there was considerable many tunes going
+on at once, and that was a drawback to the harmony, you understand; and
+then there was a lot of Injun tribes, and they kept up such another
+war-whooping that they kind of took the tuck out of the music.  By and by
+I quit performing, and judged I’d take a rest.  There was quite a nice
+mild old gentleman sitting next me, and I noticed he didn’t take a hand;
+I encouraged him, but he said he was naturally bashful, and was afraid to
+try before so many people.  By and by the old gentleman said he never
+could seem to enjoy music somehow.  The fact was, I was beginning to feel
+the same way; but I didn’t say anything.  Him and I had a considerable
+long silence, then, but of course it warn’t noticeable in that place.
+After about sixteen or seventeen hours, during which I played and sung a
+little, now and then—always the same tune, because I didn’t know any
+other—I laid down my harp and begun to fan myself with my palm branch.
+Then we both got to sighing pretty regular.  Finally, says he—
+
+“Don’t you know any tune but the one you’ve been pegging at all day?”
+
+“Not another blessed one,” says I.
+
+“Don’t you reckon you could learn another one?” says he.
+
+“Never,” says I; “I’ve tried to, but I couldn’t manage it.”
+
+“It’s a long time to hang to the one—eternity, you know.”
+
+“Don’t break my heart,” says I; “I’m getting low-spirited enough
+already.”
+
+After another long silence, says he—
+
+“Are you glad to be here?”
+
+Says I, “Old man, I’ll be frank with you.  This _ain’t_ just as near my
+idea of bliss as I thought it was going to be, when I used to go to
+church.”
+
+Says he, “What do you say to knocking off and calling it half a day?”
+
+“That’s me,” says I.  “I never wanted to get off watch so bad in my
+life.”
+
+So we started.  Millions were coming to the cloud-bank all the time,
+happy and hosannahing; millions were leaving it all the time, looking
+mighty quiet, I tell you.  We laid for the new-comers, and pretty soon
+I’d got them to hold all my things a minute, and then I was a free man
+again and most outrageously happy.  Just then I ran across old Sam
+Bartlett, who had been dead a long time, and stopped to have a talk with
+him.  Says I—
+
+“Now tell me—is this to go on forever?  Ain’t there anything else for a
+change?”
+
+Says he—
+
+“I’ll set you right on that point very quick.  People take the figurative
+language of the Bible and the allegories for literal, and the first thing
+they ask for when they get here is a halo and a harp, and so on.  Nothing
+that’s harmless and reasonable is refused a body here, if he asks it in
+the right spirit.  So they are outfitted with these things without a
+word.  They go and sing and play just about one day, and that’s the last
+you’ll ever see them in the choir.  They don’t need anybody to tell them
+that that sort of thing wouldn’t make a heaven—at least not a heaven that
+a sane man could stand a week and remain sane.  That cloud-bank is placed
+where the noise can’t disturb the old inhabitants, and so there ain’t any
+harm in letting everybody get up there and cure himself as soon as he
+comes.
+
+“Now you just remember this—heaven is as blissful and lovely as it can
+be; but it’s just the busiest place you ever heard of.  There ain’t any
+idle people here after the first day.  Singing hymns and waving palm
+branches through all eternity is pretty when you hear about it in the
+pulpit, but it’s as poor a way to put in valuable time as a body could
+contrive.  It would just make a heaven of warbling ignoramuses, don’t you
+see?  Eternal Rest sounds comforting in the pulpit, too.  Well, you try
+it once, and see how heavy time will hang on your hands.  Why,
+Stormfield, a man like you, that had been active and stirring all his
+life, would go mad in six months in a heaven where he hadn’t anything to
+do.  Heaven is the very last place to come to _rest_ in,—and don’t you be
+afraid to bet on that!”
+
+Says I—
+
+“Sam, I’m as glad to hear it as I thought I’d be sorry.  I’m glad I come,
+now.”
+
+Says he—
+
+“Cap’n, ain’t you pretty physically tired?”
+
+Says I—
+
+“Sam, it ain’t any name for it!  I’m dog-tired.”
+
+“Just so—just so.  You’ve earned a good sleep, and you’ll get it.  You’ve
+earned a good appetite, and you’ll enjoy your dinner.  It’s the same here
+as it is on earth—you’ve got to earn a thing, square and honest, before
+you enjoy it.  You can’t enjoy first and earn afterwards.  But there’s
+this difference, here: you can choose your own occupation, and all the
+powers of heaven will be put forth to help you make a success of it, if
+you do your level best.  The shoemaker on earth that had the soul of a
+poet in him won’t have to make shoes here.”
+
+“Now that’s all reasonable and right,” says I.  “Plenty of work, and the
+kind you hanker after; no more pain, no more suffering—”
+
+“Oh, hold on; there’s plenty of pain here—but it don’t kill.  There’s
+plenty of suffering here, but it don’t last.  You see, happiness ain’t a
+_thing in itself_—it’s only a _contrast_ with something that ain’t
+pleasant.  That’s all it is.  There ain’t a thing you can mention that is
+happiness in its own self—it’s only so by contrast with the other thing.
+And so, as soon as the novelty is over and the force of the contrast
+dulled, it ain’t happiness any longer, and you have to get something
+fresh.  Well, there’s plenty of pain and suffering in heaven—consequently
+there’s plenty of contrasts, and just no end of happiness.”
+
+Says I, “It’s the sensiblest heaven I’ve heard of yet, Sam, though it’s
+about as different from the one I was brought up on as a live princess is
+different from her own wax figger.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Along in the first months I knocked around about the Kingdom, making
+friends and looking at the country, and finally settled down in a pretty
+likely region, to have a rest before taking another start.  I went on
+making acquaintances and gathering up information.  I had a good deal of
+talk with an old bald-headed angel by the name of Sandy McWilliams.  He
+was from somewhere in New Jersey.  I went about with him, considerable.
+We used to lay around, warm afternoons, in the shade of a rock, on some
+meadow-ground that was pretty high and out of the marshy slush of his
+cranberry-farm, and there we used to talk about all kinds of things, and
+smoke pipes.  One day, says I—
+
+“About how old might you be, Sandy?”
+
+“Seventy-two.”
+
+“I judged so.  How long you been in heaven?”
+
+“Twenty-seven years, come Christmas.”
+
+“How old was you when you come up?”
+
+“Why, seventy-two, of course.”
+
+“You can’t mean it!”
+
+“Why can’t I mean it?”
+
+“Because, if you was seventy-two then, you are naturally ninety-nine
+now.”
+
+“No, but I ain’t.  I stay the same age I was when I come.”
+
+“Well,” says I, “come to think, there’s something just here that I want
+to ask about.  Down below, I always had an idea that in heaven we would
+all be young, and bright, and spry.”
+
+“Well, you can be young if you want to.  You’ve only got to wish.”
+
+“Well, then, why didn’t you wish?”
+
+“I did.  They all do.  You’ll try it, some day, like enough; but you’ll
+get tired of the change pretty soon.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Well, I’ll tell you.  Now you’ve always been a sailor; did you ever try
+some other business?”
+
+“Yes, I tried keeping grocery, once, up in the mines; but I couldn’t
+stand it; it was too dull—no stir, no storm, no life about it; it was
+like being part dead and part alive, both at the same time.  I wanted to
+be one thing or t’other.  I shut up shop pretty quick and went to sea.”
+
+“That’s it.  Grocery people like it, but you couldn’t.  You see you
+wasn’t used to it.  Well, I wasn’t used to being young, and I couldn’t
+seem to take any interest in it.  I was strong, and handsome, and had
+curly hair,—yes, and wings, too!—gay wings like a butterfly.  I went to
+picnics and dances and parties with the fellows, and tried to carry on
+and talk nonsense with the girls, but it wasn’t any use; I couldn’t take
+to it—fact is, it was an awful bore.  What I wanted was early to bed and
+early to rise, and something to _do_; and when my work was done, I wanted
+to sit quiet, and smoke and think—not tear around with a parcel of giddy
+young kids.  You can’t think what I suffered whilst I was young.”
+
+“How long was you young?”
+
+“Only two weeks.  That was plenty for me.  Laws, I was so lonesome!  You
+see, I was full of the knowledge and experience of seventy-two years; the
+deepest subject those young folks could strike was only _a-b-c_ to me.
+And to hear them argue—oh, my! it would have been funny, if it hadn’t
+been so pitiful.  Well, I was so hungry for the ways and the sober talk I
+was used to, that I tried to ring in with the old people, but they
+wouldn’t have it.  They considered me a conceited young upstart, and gave
+me the cold shoulder.  Two weeks was a-plenty for me.  I was glad to get
+back my bald head again, and my pipe, and my old drowsy reflections in
+the shade of a rock or a tree.”
+
+“Well,” says I, “do you mean to say you’re going to stand still at
+seventy-two, forever?”
+
+“I don’t know, and I ain’t particular.  But I ain’t going to drop back to
+twenty-five any more—I know that, mighty well.  I know a sight more than
+I did twenty-seven years ago, and I enjoy learning, all the time, but I
+don’t seem to get any older.  That is, bodily—my mind gets older, and
+stronger, and better seasoned, and more satisfactory.”
+
+Says I, “If a man comes here at ninety, don’t he ever set himself back?”
+
+“Of course he does.  He sets himself back to fourteen; tries it a couple
+of hours, and feels like a fool; sets himself forward to twenty; it ain’t
+much improvement; tries thirty, fifty, eighty, and finally ninety—finds
+he is more at home and comfortable at the same old figure he is used to
+than any other way.  Or, if his mind begun to fail him on earth at
+eighty, that’s where he finally sticks up here.  He sticks at the place
+where his mind was last at its best, for there’s where his enjoyment is
+best, and his ways most set and established.”
+
+“Does a chap of twenty-five stay always twenty-five, and look it?”
+
+“If he is a fool, yes.  But if he is bright, and ambitious and
+industrious, the knowledge he gains and the experiences he has, change
+his ways and thoughts and likings, and make him find his best pleasure in
+the company of people above that age; so he allows his body to take on
+that look of as many added years as he needs to make him comfortable and
+proper in that sort of society; he lets his body go on taking the look of
+age, according as he progresses, and by and by he will be bald and
+wrinkled outside, and wise and deep within.”
+
+“Babies the same?”
+
+“Babies the same.  Laws, what asses we used to be, on earth, about these
+things!  We said we’d be always young in heaven.  We didn’t say _how_
+young—we didn’t think of that, perhaps—that is, we didn’t all think
+alike, anyway.  When I was a boy of seven, I suppose I thought we’d all
+be twelve, in heaven; when I was twelve, I suppose I thought we’d all be
+eighteen or twenty in heaven; when I was forty, I begun to go back; I
+remember I hoped we’d all be about _thirty_ years old in heaven.  Neither
+a man nor a boy ever thinks the age he _has_ is exactly the best one—he
+puts the right age a few years older or a few years younger than he is.
+Then he makes that ideal age the general age of the heavenly people.  And
+he expects everybody _to stick_ at that age—stand stock-still—and expects
+them to enjoy it!—Now just think of the idea of standing still in heaven!
+Think of a heaven made up entirely of hoop-rolling, marble-playing cubs
+of seven years!—or of awkward, diffident, sentimental immaturities of
+nineteen!—or of vigorous people of thirty, healthy-minded, brimming with
+ambition, but chained hand and foot to that one age and its limitations
+like so many helpless galley-slaves!  Think of the dull sameness of a
+society made up of people all of one age and one set of looks, habits,
+tastes and feelings.  Think how superior to it earth would be, with its
+variety of types and faces and ages, and the enlivening attrition of the
+myriad interests that come into pleasant collision in such a variegated
+society.”
+
+“Look here,” says I, “do you know what you’re doing?”
+
+“Well, what am I doing?”
+
+“You are making heaven pretty comfortable in one way, but you are playing
+the mischief with it in another.”
+
+“How d’you mean?”
+
+“Well,” I says, “take a young mother that’s lost her child, and—”
+
+“Sh!” he says.  “Look!”
+
+It was a woman.  Middle-aged, and had grizzled hair.  She was walking
+slow, and her head was bent down, and her wings hanging limp and droopy;
+and she looked ever so tired, and was crying, poor thing!  She passed
+along by, with her head down, that way, and the tears running down her
+face, and didn’t see us.  Then Sandy said, low and gentle, and full of
+pity:
+
+“_She’s_ hunting for her child!  No, _found_ it, I reckon.  Lord, how
+she’s changed!  But I recognized her in a minute, though it’s
+twenty-seven years since I saw her.  A young mother she was, about twenty
+two or four, or along there; and blooming and lovely and sweet? oh, just
+a flower!  And all her heart and all her soul was wrapped up in her
+child, her little girl, two years old.  And it died, and she went wild
+with grief, just wild!  Well, the only comfort she had was that she’d see
+her child again, in heaven—‘never more to part,’ she said, and kept on
+saying it over and over, ‘never more to part.’  And the words made her
+happy; yes, they did; they made her joyful, and when I was dying,
+twenty-seven years ago, she told me to find her child the first thing,
+and say she was coming—‘soon, soon, _very_ soon, she hoped and
+believed!’”
+
+“Why, it’s pitiful, Sandy.”
+
+He didn’t say anything for a while, but sat looking at the ground,
+thinking.  Then he says, kind of mournful:
+
+“And now she’s come!”
+
+“Well?  Go on.”
+
+“Stormfield, maybe she hasn’t found the child, but _I_ think she has.
+Looks so to me.  I’ve seen cases before.  You see, she’s kept that child
+in her head just the same as it was when she jounced it in her arms a
+little chubby thing.  But here it didn’t elect to _stay_ a child.  No, it
+elected to grow up, which it did.  And in these twenty-seven years it has
+learned all the deep scientific learning there is to learn, and is
+studying and studying and learning and learning more and more, all the
+time, and don’t give a damn for anything _but_ learning; just learning,
+and discussing gigantic problems with people like herself.”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Stormfield, don’t you see?  Her mother knows _cranberries_, and how to
+tend them, and pick them, and put them up, and market them; and not
+another blamed thing!  Her and her daughter can’t be any more company for
+each other _now_ than mud turtle and bird o’ paradise.  Poor thing, she
+was looking for a baby to jounce; _I_ think she’s struck a
+disapp’intment.”
+
+“Sandy, what will they do—stay unhappy forever in heaven?”
+
+“No, they’ll come together and get adjusted by and by.  But not this
+year, and not next.  By and by.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+I had been having considerable trouble with my wings.  The day after I
+helped the choir I made a dash or two with them, but was not lucky.
+First off, I flew thirty yards, and then fouled an Irishman and brought
+him down—brought us both down, in fact.  Next, I had a collision with a
+Bishop—and bowled him down, of course.  We had some sharp words, and I
+felt pretty cheap, to come banging into a grave old person like that,
+with a million strangers looking on and smiling to themselves.
+
+I saw I hadn’t got the hang of the steering, and so couldn’t rightly tell
+where I was going to bring up when I started.  I went afoot the rest of
+the day, and let my wings hang.  Early next morning I went to a private
+place to have some practice.  I got up on a pretty high rock, and got a
+good start, and went swooping down, aiming for a bush a little over three
+hundred yards off; but I couldn’t seem to calculate for the wind, which
+was about two points abaft my beam.  I could see I was going considerable
+to looard of the bush, so I worked my starboard wing slow and went ahead
+strong on the port one, but it wouldn’t answer; I could see I was going
+to broach to, so I slowed down on both, and lit.  I went back to the rock
+and took another chance at it.  I aimed two or three points to starboard
+of the bush—yes, more than that—enough so as to make it nearly a
+head-wind.  I done well enough, but made pretty poor time.  I could see,
+plain enough, that on a head-wind, wings was a mistake.  I could see that
+a body could sail pretty close to the wind, but he couldn’t go in the
+wind’s eye.  I could see that if I wanted to go a-visiting any distance
+from home, and the wind was ahead, I might have to wait days, maybe, for
+a change; and I could see, too, that these things could not be any use at
+all in a gale; if you tried to run before the wind, you would make a mess
+of it, for there isn’t anyway to shorten sail—like reefing, you know—you
+have to take it _all_ in—shut your feathers down flat to your sides.
+That would _land_ you, of course.  You could lay to, with your head to
+the wind—that is the best you could do, and right hard work you’d find
+it, too.  If you tried any other game, you would founder, sure.
+
+I judge it was about a couple of weeks or so after this that I dropped
+old Sandy McWilliams a note one day—it was a Tuesday—and asked him to
+come over and take his manna and quails with me next day; and the first
+thing he did when he stepped in was to twinkle his eye in a sly way, and
+say,—
+
+“Well, Cap, what you done with your wings?”
+
+I saw in a minute that there was some sarcasm done up in that rag
+somewheres, but I never let on.  I only says,—
+
+“Gone to the wash.”
+
+“Yes,” he says, in a dry sort of way, “they mostly go to the wash—about
+this time—I’ve often noticed it.  Fresh angels are powerful neat.  When
+do you look for ’em back?”
+
+“Day after to-morrow,” says I.
+
+He winked at me, and smiled.
+
+Says I,—
+
+“Sandy, out with it.  Come—no secrets among friends.  I notice you don’t
+ever wear wings—and plenty others don’t.  I’ve been making an ass of
+myself—is that it?”
+
+“That is about the size of it.  But it is no harm.  We all do it at
+first.  It’s perfectly natural.  You see, on earth we jump to such
+foolish conclusions as to things up here.  In the pictures we always saw
+the angels with wings on—and that was all right; but we jumped to the
+conclusion that that was their way of getting around—and that was all
+wrong.  The wings ain’t anything but a uniform, that’s all.  When they
+are in the field—so to speak,—they always wear them; you never see an
+angel going with a message anywhere without his wings, any more than you
+would see a military officer presiding at a court-martial without his
+uniform, or a postman delivering letters, or a policeman walking his
+beat, in plain clothes.  But they ain’t to _fly_ with!  The wings are for
+show, not for use.  Old experienced angels are like officers of the
+regular army—they dress plain, when they are off duty.  New angels are
+like the militia—never shed the uniform—always fluttering and floundering
+around in their wings, butting people down, flapping here, and there, and
+everywhere, always imagining they are attracting the admiring eye—well,
+they just think they are the very most important people in heaven.  And
+when you see one of them come sailing around with one wing tipped up and
+t’other down, you make up your mind he is saying to himself: ‘I wish Mary
+Ann in Arkansaw could see me now.  I reckon she’d wish she hadn’t shook
+me.’  No, they’re just for show, that’s all—only just for show.”
+
+“I judge you’ve got it about right, Sandy,” says I.
+
+“Why, look at it yourself,” says he.  “_You_ ain’t built for wings—no man
+is.  You know what a grist of years it took you to come here from the
+earth—and yet you were booming along faster than any cannon-ball could
+go.  Suppose you had to fly that distance with your wings—wouldn’t
+eternity have been over before you got here?  Certainly.  Well, angels
+have to go to the earth every day—millions of them—to appear in visions
+to dying children and good people, you know—it’s the heft of their
+business.  They appear with their wings, of course, because they are on
+official service, and because the dying persons wouldn’t know they were
+angels if they hadn’t wings—but do you reckon they fly with them?  It
+stands to reason they don’t.  The wings would wear out before they got
+half-way; even the pin-feathers would be gone; the wing frames would be
+as bare as kite sticks before the paper is pasted on.  The distances in
+heaven are billions of times greater; angels have to go all over heaven
+every day; could they do it with their wings alone?  No, indeed; they
+wear the wings for style, but they travel any distance in an instant by
+_wishing_.  The wishing-carpet of the Arabian Nights was a sensible
+idea—but our earthly idea of angels flying these awful distances with
+their clumsy wings was foolish.
+
+“Our young saints, of both sexes, wear wings all the time—blazing red
+ones, and blue and green, and gold, and variegated, and rainbowed, and
+ring-streaked-and-striped ones—and nobody finds fault.  It is suitable to
+their time of life.  The things are beautiful, and they set the young
+people off.  They are the most striking and lovely part of their outfit—a
+halo don’t _begin_.”
+
+“Well,” says I, “I’ve tucked mine away in the cupboard, and I allow to
+let them lay there till there’s mud.”
+
+“Yes—or a reception.”
+
+“What’s that?”
+
+“Well, you can see one to-night if you want to.  There’s a barkeeper from
+Jersey City going to be received.”
+
+“Go on—tell me about it.”
+
+“This barkeeper got converted at a Moody and Sankey meeting, in New York,
+and started home on the ferry-boat, and there was a collision and he got
+drowned.  He is of a class that think all heaven goes wild with joy when
+a particularly hard lot like him is saved; they think all heaven turns
+out hosannahing to welcome them; they think there isn’t anything talked
+about in the realms of the blest but their case, for that day.  This
+barkeeper thinks there hasn’t been such another stir here in years, as
+his coming is going to raise.—And I’ve always noticed this peculiarity
+about a dead barkeeper—he not only expects all hands to turn out when he
+arrives, but he expects to be received with a torchlight procession.”
+
+“I reckon he is disappointed, then.”
+
+“No, he isn’t.  No man is allowed to be disappointed here.  Whatever he
+wants, when he comes—that is, any reasonable and unsacrilegious thing—he
+can have.  There’s always a few millions or billions of young folks
+around who don’t want any better entertainment than to fill up their
+lungs and swarm out with their torches and have a high time over a
+barkeeper.  It tickles the barkeeper till he can’t rest, it makes a
+charming lark for the young folks, it don’t do anybody any harm, it don’t
+cost a rap, and it keeps up the place’s reputation for making all comers
+happy and content.”
+
+“Very good.  I’ll be on hand and see them land the barkeeper.”
+
+“It is manners to go in full dress.  You want to wear your wings, you
+know, and your other things.”
+
+“Which ones?”
+
+“Halo, and harp, and palm branch, and all that.”
+
+“Well,” says I, “I reckon I ought to be ashamed of myself, but the fact
+is I left them laying around that day I resigned from the choir.  I
+haven’t got a rag to wear but this robe and the wings.”
+
+“That’s all right.  You’ll find they’ve been raked up and saved for you.
+Send for them.”
+
+“I’ll do it, Sandy.  But what was it you was saying about unsacrilegious
+things, which people expect to get, and will be disappointed about?”
+
+“Oh, there are a lot of such things that people expect and don’t get.
+For instance, there’s a Brooklyn preacher by the name of Talmage, who is
+laying up a considerable disappointment for himself.  He says, every now
+and then in his sermons, that the first thing he does when he gets to
+heaven, will be to fling his arms around Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and
+kiss them and weep on them.  There’s millions of people down there on
+earth that are promising themselves the same thing.  As many as sixty
+thousand people arrive here every single day, that want to run straight
+to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and hug them and weep on them.  Now mind
+you, sixty thousand a day is a pretty heavy contract for those old
+people.  If they were a mind to allow it, they wouldn’t ever have
+anything to do, year in and year out, but stand up and be hugged and wept
+on thirty-two hours in the twenty-four.  They would be tired out and as
+wet as muskrats all the time.  What would heaven be, to _them_?  It would
+be a mighty good place to get out of—you know that, yourself.  Those are
+kind and gentle old Jews, but they ain’t any fonder of kissing the
+emotional highlights of Brooklyn than you be.  You mark my words, Mr.
+T.’s endearments are going to be declined, with thanks.  There are limits
+to the privileges of the elect, even in heaven.  Why, if Adam was to show
+himself to every new comer that wants to call and gaze at him and strike
+him for his autograph, he would never have time to do anything else but
+just that.  Talmage has said he is going to give Adam some of his
+attentions, as well as A., I. and J.  But he will have to change his mind
+about that.”
+
+“Do you think Talmage will really come here?”
+
+“Why, certainly, he will; but don’t you be alarmed; he will run with his
+own kind, and there’s plenty of them.  That is the main charm of
+heaven—there’s all kinds here—which wouldn’t be the case if you let the
+preachers tell it.  Anybody can find the sort he prefers, here, and he
+just lets the others alone, and they let him alone.  When the Deity
+builds a heaven, it is built right, and on a liberal plan.”
+
+Sandy sent home for his things, and I sent for mine, and about nine in
+the evening we begun to dress.  Sandy says,—
+
+“This is going to be a grand time for you, Stormy.  Like as not some of
+the patriarchs will turn out.”
+
+“No, but will they?”
+
+“Like as not.  Of course they are pretty exclusive.  They hardly ever
+show themselves to the common public.  I believe they never turn out
+except for an eleventh-hour convert.  They wouldn’t do it then, only
+earthly tradition makes a grand show pretty necessary on that kind of an
+occasion.”
+
+“Do they an turn out, Sandy?”
+
+“Who?—all the patriarchs?  Oh, no—hardly ever more than a couple.  You
+will be here fifty thousand years—maybe more—before you get a glimpse of
+all the patriarchs and prophets.  Since I have been here, Job has been to
+the front once, and once Ham and Jeremiah both at the same time.  But the
+finest thing that has happened in my day was a year or so ago; that was
+Charles Peace’s reception—him they called ‘the Bannercross Murderer’—an
+Englishman.  There were four patriarchs and two prophets on the Grand
+Stand that time—there hasn’t been anything like it since Captain Kidd
+came; Abel was there—the first time in twelve hundred years.  A report
+got around that Adam was coming; well, of course, Abel was enough to
+bring a crowd, all by himself, but there is nobody that can draw like
+Adam.  It was a false report, but it got around, anyway, as I say, and it
+will be a long day before I see the like of it again.  The reception was
+in the English department, of course, which is eight hundred and eleven
+million miles from the New Jersey line.  I went, along with a good many
+of my neighbors, and it was a sight to see, I can tell you.  Flocks came
+from all the departments.  I saw Esquimaux there, and Tartars, Negroes,
+Chinamen—people from everywhere.  You see a mixture like that in the
+Grand Choir, the first day you land here, but you hardly ever see it
+again.  There were billions of people; when they were singing or
+hosannahing, the noise was wonderful; and even when their tongues were
+still the drumming of the wings was nearly enough to burst your head, for
+all the sky was as thick as if it was snowing angels.  Although Adam was
+not there, it was a great time anyway, because we had three archangels on
+the Grand Stand—it is a seldom thing that even one comes out.”
+
+“What did they look like, Sandy?”
+
+“Well, they had shining faces, and shining robes, and wonderful rainbow
+wings, and they stood eighteen feet high, and wore swords, and held their
+heads up in a noble way, and looked like soldiers.”
+
+“Did they have halos?”
+
+“No—anyway, not the hoop kind.  The archangels and the upper-class
+patriarchs wear a finer thing than that.  It is a round, solid, splendid
+glory of gold, that is blinding to look at.  You have often seen a
+patriarch in a picture, on earth, with that thing on—you remember it?—he
+looks as if he had his head in a brass platter.  That don’t give you the
+right idea of it at all—it is much more shining and beautiful.”
+
+“Did you talk with those archangels and patriarchs, Sandy?”
+
+“Who—_I_?  Why, what can you be thinking about, Stormy?  I ain’t worthy
+to speak to such as they.”
+
+“Is Talmage?”
+
+“Of course not.  You have got the same mixed-up idea about these things
+that everybody has down there.  I had it once, but I got over it.  Down
+there they talk of the heavenly King—and that is right—but then they go
+right on speaking as if this was a republic and everybody was on a dead
+level with everybody else, and privileged to fling his arms around
+anybody he comes across, and be hail-fellow-well-met with all the elect,
+from the highest down.  How tangled up and absurd that is!  How are you
+going to have a republic under a king?  How are you going to have a
+republic at all, where the head of the government is absolute, holds his
+place forever, and has no parliament, no council to meddle or make in his
+affairs, nobody voted for, nobody elected, nobody in the whole universe
+with a voice in the government, nobody asked to take a hand in its
+matters, and nobody _allowed_ to do it?  Fine republic, ain’t it?”
+
+“Well, yes—it _is_ a little different from the idea I had—but I thought I
+might go around and get acquainted with the grandees, anyway—not exactly
+splice the main-brace with them, you know, but shake hands and pass the
+time of day.”
+
+“Could Tom, Dick and Harry call on the Cabinet of Russia and do that?—on
+Prince Gortschakoff, for instance?”
+
+“I reckon not, Sandy.”
+
+“Well, this is Russia—only more so.  There’s not the shadow of a republic
+about it anywhere.  There are ranks, here.  There are viceroys, princes,
+governors, sub-governors, sub-sub-governors, and a hundred orders of
+nobility, grading along down from grand-ducal archangels, stage by stage,
+till the general level is struck, where there ain’t any titles.  Do you
+know what a prince of the blood is, on earth?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Well, a prince of the blood don’t belong to the royal family exactly,
+and he don’t belong to the mere nobility of the kingdom; he is lower than
+the one, and higher than t’other.  That’s about the position of the
+patriarchs and prophets here.  There’s some mighty high nobility
+here—people that you and I ain’t worthy to polish sandals for—and _they_
+ain’t worthy to polish sandals for the patriarchs and prophets.  That
+gives you a kind of an idea of their rank, don’t it?  You begin to see
+how high up they are, don’t you? just to get a two-minute glimpse of one
+of them is a thing for a body to remember and tell about for a thousand
+years.  Why, Captain, just think of this: if Abraham was to set his foot
+down here by this door, there would be a railing set up around that
+foot-track right away, and a shelter put over it, and people would flock
+here from all over heaven, for hundreds and hundreds of years, to look at
+it.  Abraham is one of the parties that Mr. Talmage, of Brooklyn, is
+going to embrace, and kiss, and weep on, when he comes.  He wants to lay
+in a good stock of tears, you know, or five to one he will go dry before
+he gets a chance to do it.”
+
+“Sandy,” says I, “I had an idea that _I_ was going to be equals with
+everybody here, too, but I will let that drop.  It don’t matter, and I am
+plenty happy enough anyway.”
+
+“Captain, you are happier than you would be, the other way.  These old
+patriarchs and prophets have got ages the start of you; they know more in
+two minutes than you know in a year.  Did you ever try to have a sociable
+improving-time discussing winds, and currents and variations of compass
+with an undertaker?”
+
+“I get your idea, Sandy.  He couldn’t interest me.  He would be an
+ignoramus in such things—he would bore me, and I would bore him.”
+
+“You have got it.  You would bore the patriarchs when you talked, and
+when they talked they would shoot over your head.  By and by you would
+say, ‘Good morning, your Eminence, I will call again’—but you wouldn’t.
+Did you ever ask the slush-boy to come up in the cabin and take dinner
+with you?”
+
+“I get your drift again, Sandy.  I wouldn’t be used to such grand people
+as the patriarchs and prophets, and I would be sheepish and tongue-tied
+in their company, and mighty glad to get out of it.  Sandy, which is the
+highest rank, patriarch or prophet?”
+
+“Oh, the prophets hold over the patriarchs.  The newest prophet, even, is
+of a sight more consequence than the oldest patriarch.  Yes, sir, Adam
+himself has to walk behind Shakespeare.”
+
+“Was Shakespeare a prophet?”
+
+“Of course he was; and so was Homer, and heaps more.  But Shakespeare and
+the rest have to walk behind a common tailor from Tennessee, by the name
+of Billings; and behind a horse-doctor named Sakka, from Afghanistan.
+Jeremiah, and Billings and Buddha walk together, side by side, right
+behind a crowd from planets not in our astronomy; next come a dozen or
+two from Jupiter and other worlds; next come Daniel, and Sakka and
+Confucius; next a lot from systems outside of ours; next come Ezekiel,
+and Mahomet, Zoroaster, and a knife-grinder from ancient Egypt; then
+there is a long string, and after them, away down toward the bottom, come
+Shakespeare and Homer, and a shoemaker named Marais, from the back
+settlements of France.”
+
+“Have they really rung in Mahomet and all those other heathens?”
+
+“Yes—they all had their message, and they all get their reward.  The man
+who don’t get his reward on earth, needn’t bother—he will get it here,
+sure.”
+
+“But why did they throw off on Shakespeare, that way, and put him away
+down there below those shoe-makers and horse-doctors and knife-grinders—a
+lot of people nobody ever heard of?”
+
+“That is the heavenly justice of it—they warn’t rewarded according to
+their deserts, on earth, but here they get their rightful rank.  That
+tailor Billings, from Tennessee, wrote poetry that Homer and Shakespeare
+couldn’t begin to come up to; but nobody would print it, nobody read it
+but his neighbors, an ignorant lot, and they laughed at it.  Whenever the
+village had a drunken frolic and a dance, they would drag him in and
+crown him with cabbage leaves, and pretend to bow down to him; and one
+night when he was sick and nearly starved to death, they had him out and
+crowned him, and then they rode him on a rail about the village, and
+everybody followed along, beating tin pans and yelling.  Well, he died
+before morning.  He wasn’t ever expecting to go to heaven, much less that
+there was going to be any fuss made over him, so I reckon he was a good
+deal surprised when the reception broke on him.”
+
+“Was you there, Sandy?”
+
+“Bless you, no!”
+
+“Why?  Didn’t you know it was going to come off?”
+
+“Well, I judge I did.  It was the talk of these realms—not for a day,
+like this barkeeper business, but for twenty years before the man died.”
+
+“Why the mischief didn’t you go, then?”
+
+“Now how you talk!  The like of me go meddling around at the reception of
+a prophet?  A mudsill like me trying to push in and help receive an awful
+grandee like Edward J. Billings?  Why, I should have been laughed at for
+a billion miles around.  I shouldn’t ever heard the last of it.”
+
+“Well, who did go, then?”
+
+“Mighty few people that you and I will ever get a chance to see, Captain.
+Not a solitary commoner ever has the luck to see a reception of a
+prophet, I can tell you.  All the nobility, and all the patriarchs and
+prophets—every last one of them—and all the archangels, and all the
+princes and governors and viceroys, were there,—and _no_ small fry—not a
+single one.  And mind you, I’m not talking about only the grandees from
+_our_ world, but the princes and patriarchs and so on from _all_ the
+worlds that shine in our sky, and from billions more that belong in
+systems upon systems away outside of the one our sun is in.  There were
+some prophets and patriarchs there that ours ain’t a circumstance to, for
+rank and illustriousness and all that.  Some were from Jupiter and other
+worlds in our own system, but the most celebrated were three poets, Saa,
+Bo and Soof, from great planets in three different and very remote
+systems.  These three names are common and familiar in every nook and
+corner of heaven, clear from one end of it to the other—fully as well
+known as the eighty Supreme Archangels, in fact—where as our Moses, and
+Adam, and the rest, have not been heard of outside of our world’s little
+corner of heaven, except by a few very learned men scattered here and
+there—and they always spell their names wrong, and get the performances
+of one mixed up with the doings of another, and they almost always locate
+them simply _in our solar system_, and think that is enough without going
+into little details such as naming the particular world they are from.
+It is like a learned Hindoo showing off how much he knows by saying
+Longfellow lives in the United States—as if he lived all over the United
+States, and as if the country was so small you couldn’t throw a brick
+there without hitting him.  Between you and me, it does gravel me, the
+cool way people from those monster worlds outside our system snub our
+little world, and even our system.  Of course we think a good deal of
+Jupiter, because our world is only a potato to it, for size; but then
+there are worlds in other systems that Jupiter isn’t even a mustard-seed
+to—like the planet Goobra, for instance, which you couldn’t squeeze
+inside the orbit of Halley’s comet without straining the rivets.
+Tourists from Goobra (I mean parties that lived and died there—natives)
+come here, now and then, and inquire about our world, and when they find
+out it is so little that a streak of lightning can flash clear around it
+in the eighth of a second, they have to lean up against something to
+laugh.  Then they screw a glass into their eye and go to examining us, as
+if we were a curious kind of foreign bug, or something of that sort.  One
+of them asked me how long our day was; and when I told him it was twelve
+hours long, as a general thing, he asked me if people where I was from
+considered it worth while to get up and wash for such a day as that.
+That is the way with those Goobra people—they can’t seem to let a chance
+go by to throw it in your face that their day is three hundred and
+twenty-two of our years long.  This young snob was just of age—he was six
+or seven thousand of his days old—say two million of our years—and he had
+all the puppy airs that belong to that time of life—that turning-point
+when a person has got over being a boy and yet ain’t quite a man exactly.
+If it had been anywhere else but in heaven, I would have given him a
+piece of my mind.  Well, anyway, Billings had the grandest reception that
+has been seen in thousands of centuries, and I think it will have a good
+effect.  His name will be carried pretty far, and it will make our system
+talked about, and maybe our world, too, and raise us in the respect of
+the general public of heaven.  Why, look here—Shakespeare walked
+backwards before that tailor from Tennessee, and scattered flowers for
+him to walk on, and Homer stood behind his chair and waited on him at the
+banquet.  Of course that didn’t go for much _there_, amongst all those
+big foreigners from other systems, as they hadn’t heard of Shakespeare or
+Homer either, but it would amount to considerable down there on our
+little earth if they could know about it.  I wish there was something in
+that miserable spiritualism, so we could send them word.  That Tennessee
+village would set up a monument to Billings, then, and his autograph
+would outsell Satan’s.  Well, they had grand times at that reception—a
+small-fry noble from Hoboken told me all about it—Sir Richard Duffer,
+Baronet.”
+
+“What, Sandy, a nobleman from Hoboken?  How is that?”
+
+“Easy enough.  Duffer kept a sausage-shop and never saved a cent in his
+life because he used to give all his spare meat to the poor, in a quiet
+way.  Not tramps,—no, the other sort—the sort that will starve before
+they will beg—honest square people out of work.  Dick used to watch
+hungry-looking men and women and children, and track them home, and find
+out all about them from the neighbors, and then feed them and find them
+work.  As nobody ever saw him give anything to anybody, he had the
+reputation of being mean; he died with it, too, and everybody said it was
+a good riddance; but the minute he landed here, they made him a baronet,
+and the very first words Dick the sausage-maker of Hoboken heard when he
+stepped upon the heavenly shore were, ‘Welcome, Sir Richard Duffer!’  It
+surprised him some, because he thought he had reasons to believe he was
+pointed for a warmer climate than this one.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+All of a sudden the whole region fairly rocked under the crash of eleven
+hundred and one thunder blasts, all let off at once, and Sandy says,—
+
+“There, that’s for the barkeep.”
+
+I jumped up and says,—
+
+“Then let’s be moving along, Sandy; we don’t want to miss any of this
+thing, you know.”
+
+“Keep your seat,” he says; “he is only just telegraphed, that is all.”
+
+“How?”
+
+“That blast only means that he has been sighted from the signal-station.
+He is off Sandy Hook.  The committees will go down to meet him, now, and
+escort him in.  There will be ceremonies and delays; they won’t he coming
+up the Bay for a considerable time, yet.  It is several billion miles
+away, anyway.”
+
+“_I_ could have been a barkeeper and a hard lot just as well as not,”
+says I, remembering the lonesome way I arrived, and how there wasn’t any
+committee nor anything.
+
+“I notice some regret in your voice,” says Sandy, “and it is natural
+enough; but let bygones be bygones; you went according to your lights,
+and it is too late now to mend the thing.”
+
+“No, let it slide, Sandy, I don’t mind.  But you’ve got a Sandy Hook
+_here_, too, have you?”
+
+“We’ve got everything here, just as it is below.  All the States and
+Territories of the Union, and all the kingdoms of the earth and the
+islands of the sea are laid out here just as they are on the globe—all
+the same shape they are down there, and all graded to the relative size,
+only each State and realm and island is a good many billion times bigger
+here than it is below.  There goes another blast.”
+
+“What is that one for?”
+
+“That is only another fort answering the first one.  They each fire
+eleven hundred and one thunder blasts at a single dash—it is the usual
+salute for an eleventh-hour guest; a hundred for each hour and an extra
+one for the guest’s sex; if it was a woman we would know it by their
+leaving off the extra gun.”
+
+“How do we know there’s eleven hundred and one, Sandy, when they all go
+off at once?—and yet we certainly do know.”
+
+“Our intellects are a good deal sharpened up, here, in some ways, and
+that is one of them.  Numbers and sizes and distances are so great, here,
+that we have to be made so we can _feel_ them—our old ways of counting
+and measuring and ciphering wouldn’t ever give us an idea of them, but
+would only confuse us and oppress us and make our heads ache.”
+
+After some more talk about this, I says: “Sandy, I notice that I hardly
+ever see a white angel; where I run across one white angel, I strike as
+many as a hundred million copper-colored ones—people that can’t speak
+English.  How is that?”
+
+“Well, you will find it the same in any State or Territory of the
+American corner of heaven you choose to go to.  I have shot along, a
+whole week on a stretch, and gone millions and millions of miles, through
+perfect swarms of angels, without ever seeing a single white one, or
+hearing a word I could understand.  You see, America was occupied a
+billion years and more, by Injuns and Aztecs, and that sort of folks,
+before a white man ever set his foot in it.  During the first three
+hundred years after Columbus’s discovery, there wasn’t ever more than one
+good lecture audience of white people, all put together, in America—I
+mean the whole thing, British Possessions and all; in the beginning of
+our century there were only 6,000,000 or 7,000,000—say seven; 12,000,000
+or 14,000,000 in 1825; say 23,000,000 in 1850; 40,000,000 in 1875.  Our
+death-rate has always been 20 in 1000 per annum.  Well, 140,000 died the
+first year of the century; 280,000 the twenty-fifth year; 500,000 the
+fiftieth year; about a million the seventy-fifth year.  Now I am going to
+be liberal about this thing, and consider that fifty million whites have
+died in America from the beginning up to to-day—make it sixty, if you
+want to; make it a hundred million—it’s no difference about a few
+millions one way or t’other.  Well, now, you can see, yourself, that when
+you come to spread a little dab of people like that over these hundreds
+of billions of miles of American territory here in heaven, it is like
+scattering a ten-cent box of homoeopathic pills over the Great Sahara and
+expecting to find them again.  You can’t expect us to amount to anything
+in heaven, and we _don’t_—now that is the simple fact, and we have got to
+do the best we can with it.  The learned men from other planets and other
+systems come here and hang around a while, when they are touring around
+the Kingdom, and then go back to their own section of heaven and write a
+book of travels, and they give America about five lines in it.  And what
+do they say about us?  They say this wilderness is populated with a
+scattering few hundred thousand billions of red angels, with now and then
+a curiously complected _diseased_ one.  You see, they think we whites and
+the occasional nigger are Injuns that have been bleached out or blackened
+by some leprous disease or other—for some peculiarly rascally _sin_, mind
+you.  It is a mighty sour pill for us all, my friend—even the modestest
+of us, let alone the other kind, that think they are going to be received
+like a long-lost government bond, and hug Abraham into the bargain.  I
+haven’t asked you any of the particulars, Captain, but I judge it goes
+without saying—if my experience is worth anything—that there wasn’t much
+of a hooraw made over you when you arrived—now was there?”
+
+“Don’t mention it, Sandy,” says I, coloring up a little; “I wouldn’t have
+had the family see it for any amount you are a mind to name.  Change the
+subject, Sandy, change the subject.”
+
+“Well, do you think of settling in the California department of bliss?”
+
+“I don’t know.  I wasn’t calculating on doing anything really definite in
+that direction till the family come.  I thought I would just look around,
+meantime, in a quiet way, and make up my mind.  Besides, I know a good
+many dead people, and I was calculating to hunt them up and swap a little
+gossip with them about friends, and old times, and one thing or another,
+and ask them how they like it here, as far as they have got.  I reckon my
+wife will want to camp in the California range, though, because most all
+her departed will be there, and she likes to be with folks she knows.”
+
+“Don’t you let her.  You see what the Jersey district of heaven is, for
+whites; well, the Californian district is a thousand times worse.  It
+swarms with a mean kind of leather-headed mud-colored angels—and your
+nearest white neighbor is likely to be a million miles away.  _What a man
+mostly misses_, _in heaven_, _is company_—company of his own sort and
+color and language.  I have come near settling in the European part of
+heaven once or twice on that account.”
+
+“Well, why didn’t you, Sandy?”
+
+“Oh, various reasons.  For one thing, although you _see_ plenty of whites
+there, you can’t understand any of them, hardly, and so you go about as
+hungry for talk as you do here.  I like to look at a Russian or a German
+or an Italian—I even like to look at a Frenchman if I ever have the luck
+to catch him engaged in anything that ain’t indelicate—but _looking_
+don’t cure the hunger—what you want is talk.”
+
+“Well, there’s England, Sandy—the English district of heaven.”
+
+“Yes, but it is not so very much better than this end of the heavenly
+domain.  As long as you run across Englishmen born this side of three
+hundred years ago, you are all right; but the minute you get back of
+Elizabeth’s time the language begins to fog up, and the further back you
+go the foggier it gets.  I had some talk with one Langland and a man by
+the name of Chaucer—old-time poets—but it was no use, I couldn’t quite
+understand them, and they couldn’t quite understand me.  I have had
+letters from them since, but it is such broken English I can’t make it
+out.  Back of those men’s time the English are just simply foreigners,
+nothing more, nothing less; they talk Danish, German, Norman French, and
+sometimes a mixture of all three; back of _them_, they talk Latin, and
+ancient British, Irish, and Gaelic; and then back of these come billions
+and billions of pure savages that talk a gibberish that Satan himself
+couldn’t understand.  The fact is, where you strike one man in the
+English settlements that you can understand, you wade through awful
+swarms that talk something you can’t make head nor tail of.  You see,
+every country on earth has been overlaid so often, in the course of a
+billion years, with different kinds of people and different sorts of
+languages, that this sort of mongrel business was bound to be the result
+in heaven.”
+
+“Sandy,” says I, “did you see a good many of the great people history
+tells about?”
+
+“Yes—plenty.  I saw kings and all sorts of distinguished people.”
+
+“Do the kings rank just as they did below?”
+
+“No; a body can’t bring his rank up here with him.  Divine right is a
+good-enough earthly romance, but it don’t go, here.  Kings drop down to
+the general level as soon as they reach the realms of grace.  I knew
+Charles the Second very well—one of the most popular comedians in the
+English section—draws first rate.  There are better, of course—people
+that were never heard of on earth—but Charles is making a very good
+reputation indeed, and is considered a rising man.  Richard the
+Lion-hearted is in the prize-ring, and coming into considerable favor.
+Henry the Eighth is a tragedian, and the scenes where he kills people are
+done to the very life.  Henry the Sixth keeps a religious-book stand.”
+
+“Did you ever see Napoleon, Sandy?”
+
+“Often—sometimes in the Corsican range, sometimes in the French.  He
+always hunts up a conspicuous place, and goes frowning around with his
+arms folded and his field-glass under his arm, looking as grand, gloomy
+and peculiar as his reputation calls for, and very much bothered because
+he don’t stand as high, here, for a soldier, as he expected to.”
+
+“Why, who stands higher?”
+
+“Oh, a _lot_ of people _we_ never heard of before—the shoemaker and
+horse-doctor and knife-grinder kind, you know—clodhoppers from goodness
+knows where that never handled a sword or fired a shot in their lives—but
+the soldiership was in them, though they never had a chance to show it.
+But here they take their right place, and Cæsar and Napoleon and
+Alexander have to take a back seat.  The greatest military genius our
+world ever produced was a brick-layer from somewhere back of Boston—died
+during the Revolution—by the name of Absalom Jones.  Wherever he goes,
+crowds flock to see him.  You see, everybody knows that if he had had a
+chance he would have shown the world some generalship that would have
+made all generalship before look like child’s play and ’prentice work.
+But he never got a chance; he tried heaps of times to enlist as a
+private, but he had lost both thumbs and a couple of front teeth, and the
+recruiting sergeant wouldn’t pass him.  However, as I say, everybody
+knows, now, what he _would_ have been,—and so they flock by the million
+to get a glimpse of him whenever they hear he is going to be anywhere.
+Cæsar, and Hannibal, and Alexander, and Napoleon are all on his staff,
+and ever so many more great generals; but the public hardly care to look
+at _them_ when _he_ is around.  Boom!  There goes another salute.  The
+barkeeper’s off quarantine now.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Sandy and I put on our things.  Then we made a wish, and in a second we
+were at the reception-place.  We stood on the edge of the ocean of space,
+and looked out over the dimness, but couldn’t make out anything.  Close
+by us was the Grand Stand—tier on tier of dim thrones rising up toward
+the zenith.  From each side of it spread away the tiers of seats for the
+general public.  They spread away for leagues and leagues—you couldn’t
+see the ends.  They were empty and still, and hadn’t a cheerful look, but
+looked dreary, like a theatre before anybody comes—gas turned down.
+Sandy says,—
+
+“We’ll sit down here and wait.  We’ll see the head of the procession come
+in sight away off yonder pretty soon, now.”
+
+Says I,—
+
+“It’s pretty lonesome, Sandy; I reckon there’s a hitch somewheres.
+Nobody but just you and me—it ain’t much of a display for the barkeeper.”
+
+“Don’t you fret, it’s all right.  There’ll be one more gun-fire—then
+you’ll see.”
+
+In a little while we noticed a sort of a lightish flush, away off on the
+horizon.
+
+“Head of the torchlight procession,” says Sandy.
+
+It spread, and got lighter and brighter: soon it had a strong glare like
+a locomotive headlight; it kept on getting brighter and brighter till it
+was like the sun peeping above the horizon-line at sea—the big red rays
+shot high up into the sky.
+
+“Keep your eyes on the Grand Stand and the miles of seats—sharp!” says
+Sandy, “and listen for the gun-fire.”
+
+Just then it burst out, “Boom-boom-boom!” like a million thunderstorms in
+one, and made the whole heavens rock.  Then there was a sudden and awful
+glare of light all about us, and in that very instant every one of the
+millions of seats was occupied, and as far as you could see, in both
+directions, was just a solid pack of people, and the place was all
+splendidly lit up!  It was enough to take a body’s breath away.  Sandy
+says,—
+
+“That is the way we do it here.  No time fooled away; nobody straggling
+in after the curtain’s up.  Wishing is quicker work than travelling.  A
+quarter of a second ago these folks were millions of miles from here.
+When they heard the last signal, all they had to do was to wish, and here
+they are.”
+
+The prodigious choir struck up,—
+
+    We long to hear thy voice,
+    To see thee face to face.
+
+It was noble music, but the uneducated chipped in and spoilt it, just as
+the congregations used to do on earth.
+
+The head of the procession began to pass, now, and it was a wonderful
+sight.  It swept along, thick and solid, five hundred thousand angels
+abreast, and every angel carrying a torch and singing—the whirring
+thunder of the wings made a body’s head ache.  You could follow the line
+of the procession back, and slanting upward into the sky, far away in a
+glittering snaky rope, till it was only a faint streak in the distance.
+The rush went on and on, for a long time, and at last, sure enough, along
+comes the barkeeper, and then everybody rose, and a cheer went up that
+made the heavens shake, I tell you!  He was all smiles, and had his halo
+tilted over one ear in a cocky way, and was the most satisfied-looking
+saint I ever saw.  While he marched up the steps of the Grand Stand, the
+choir struck up,—
+
+    “The whole wide heaven groans,
+    And waits to hear that voice.”
+
+There were four gorgeous tents standing side by side in the place of
+honor, on a broad railed platform in the centre of the Grand Stand, with
+a shining guard of honor round about them.  The tents had been shut up
+all this time.  As the barkeeper climbed along up, bowing and smiling to
+everybody, and at last got to the platform, these tents were jerked up
+aloft all of a sudden, and we saw four noble thrones of gold, all caked
+with jewels, and in the two middle ones sat old white-whiskered men, and
+in the two others a couple of the most glorious and gaudy giants, with
+platter halos and beautiful armor.  All the millions went down on their
+knees, and stared, and looked glad, and burst out into a joyful kind of
+murmurs.  They said,—
+
+“Two archangels!—that is splendid.  Who can the others be?”
+
+The archangels gave the barkeeper a stiff little military bow; the two
+old men rose; one of them said, “Moses and Esau welcome thee!” and then
+all the four vanished, and the thrones were empty.
+
+The barkeeper looked a little disappointed, for he was calculating to hug
+those old people, I judge; but it was the gladdest and proudest multitude
+you ever saw—because they had seen Moses and Esau.  Everybody was saying,
+“Did you see them?—I did—Esau’s side face was to me, but I saw Moses full
+in the face, just as plain as I see you this minute!”
+
+The procession took up the barkeeper and moved on with him again, and the
+crowd broke up and scattered.  As we went along home, Sandy said it was a
+great success, and the barkeeper would have a right to be proud of it
+forever.  And he said we were in luck, too; said we might attend
+receptions for forty thousand years to come, and not have a chance to see
+a brace of such grand moguls as Moses and Esau.  We found afterwards that
+we had come near seeing another patriarch, and likewise a genuine prophet
+besides, but at the last moment they sent regrets.  Sandy said there
+would be a monument put up there, where Moses and Esau had stood, with
+the date and circumstances, and all about the whole business, and
+travellers would come for thousands of years and gawk at it, and climb
+over it, and scribble their names on it.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+
+{9}  The captain could not remember what this word was.  He said it was
+in a foreign tongue.
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXTRACT FROM CAPTAIN STORMFIELD'S
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