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 shoe-maker 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 be 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 Caesar 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.

Caesar, 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:

{1} The captain could not remember what this word was. He said it was

in a foreign tongue.

End of Project Gutenberg's EXTRACT FROM CAPTAIN STORMFIELD'S VISIT TO HEAVEN,

by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

GOLDSMITH'S FRIEND ABROAD AGAIN

by Mark Twain

NOTE.--No experience is set down in the following letters which had to be

invented. Fancy is not needed to give variety to the history of a

Chinaman's sojourn in America. Plain fact is amply sufficient.

LETTER I

SHANGHAI, 18--.

DEAR CHING-FOO: It is all settled, and I am to leave my oppressed and

overburdened native land and cross the sea to that noble realm where all

are free and all equal, and none reviled or abused--America! America,

whose precious privilege it is to call herself the Land of the Free and

the Home of the Brave. We and all that are about us here look over the

waves longingly, contrasting the privations of this our birthplace with

the opulent comfort of that happy refuge. We know how America has

welcomed the Germans and the Frenchmen and the stricken and sorrowing

Irish, and we know how she has given them bread and work, and liberty,

and how grateful they are. And we know that America stands ready to

welcome all other oppressed peoples and offer her abundance to all that

come, without asking what their nationality is, or their creed or color.

And, without being told it, we know that the, foreign sufferers she has

rescued from oppression and starvation are the most eager of her children

to welcome us, because, having suffered themselves, they know what

suffering is, and having been generously succored, they long to be

generous to other unfortunates and thus show that magnanimity is not

wasted upon them.

AH SONG HI.

LETTER II

AT SEA, 18--.

DEAR CHING-FOO: We are far away at sea now; on our way to the beautiful

Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. We shall soon be where all men

are alike, and where sorrow is not known.

The good American who hired me to go to his country is to pay me $12 a

month, which is immense wages, you know--twenty times as much as one gets

in China. My passage in the ship is a very large sum--indeed, it is a

fortune--and this I must pay myself eventually, but I am allowed ample

time to make it good to my employer in, he advancing it now. For a mere

form, I have turned over my wife, my boy, and my two daughters to my

employer's partner for security for the payment of the ship fare. But my

employer says they are in no danger of being sold, for he knows I will be

faithful to him, and that is the main security.

I thought I would have twelve dollars to, begin life with in America, but

the American Consul took two of them for making a certificate that I was

shipped on the steamer. He has no right to do more than charge the ship

two dollars for one certificate for the ship, with the number of her

Chinese passengers set down in it; but he chooses to force a certificate

upon each and every Chinaman and put the two dollars in his pocket. As

1,300 of my countrymen are in this vessel, the Consul received $2,600 for

certificates. My employer tells me that the Government at Washington

know of this fraud, and are so bitterly opposed to the existence of such

a wrong that they tried hard to have the extor--the fee, I mean,

legalised by the last Congress;--[Pacific and Mediterranean steamship

bills.(Ed. Mem.)]--but as the bill did not pass, the Consul will have

to take the fee dishonestly until next Congress makes it legitimate. It

is a great and good and noble country, and hates all forms of vice and

chicanery.

We are in that part of the vessel always reserved for my countrymen.

It is called the steerage. It is kept for us, my employer says, because

it is not subject to changes of temperature and dangerous drafts of air.

It is only another instance of the loving unselfishness of the Americans

for all unfortunate foreigners. The steerage is a little crowded, and

rather warm and close, but no doubt it is best for us that it should be

so.

Yesterday our people got to quarrelling among themselves, and the captain

turned a volume of hot steam upon a mass of them and scalded eighty or

ninety of them more or less severely. Flakes and ribbons of skin came

off some of them. There was wild shrieking and struggling while the

vapour enveloped the great throng, and so some who were not scalded got

trampled upon and hurt. We do not complain, for my employer says this is

the usual way of quieting disturbances on board the ship, and that it is

done in the cabins among the Americans every day or two.

Congratulate me, Ching-Fool In ten days more I shall step upon the shore

of America, and be received by her great-hearted people; and I shall

straighten myself up and feel that I am a free man among freemen.

AH SONG HI.

LETTER III

SAN FRANCISCO, 18--.

DEAR CHING-FOO: I stepped ashore jubilant! I wanted to dance, shout,

sing, worship the generous Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. But

as I walked from the gangplank a man in a gray uniform--[Policeman]

--kicked me violently behind and told me to look out--so my employer

translated it. As I turned, another officer of the same kind struck me

with a short club and also instructed me to look out. I was about to

take hold of my end of the pole which had mine and Hong-Wo's basket and

things suspended from it, when a third officer hit me with his club to

signify that I was to drop it, and then kicked me to signify that he was

satisfied with my promptness. Another person came now, and searched all

through our basket and bundles, emptying everything out on the dirty

wharf. Then this person and another searched us all over. They found a

little package of opium sewed into the artificial part of Hong-Wo's

queue, and they took that, and also they made him prisoner and handed him

over to an officer, who marched him away. They took his luggage, too,

because of his crime, and as our luggage was so mixed together that they

could not tell mine from his, they took it all. When I offered to help

divide it, they kicked me and desired me to look out.

Having now no baggage and no companion, I told my employer that if he was

willing, I would walk about a little and see the city and the people

until he needed me. I did not like to seem disappointed with my

reception in the good land of refuge for the oppressed, and so I looked

and spoke as cheerily as I could. But he said, wait a minute--I must be

vaccinated to prevent my taking the small-pox. I smiled and said I had

already had the small-pox, as he could see by the marks, and so I need

not wait to be "vaccinated," as he called it. But he said it was the

law, and I must be vaccinated anyhow. The doctor would never let me

pass, for the law obliged him to vaccinate all Chinamen and charge them

ten dollars apiece for it, and I might be sure that no doctor who would

be the servant of that law would let a fee slip through his fingers to

accommodate any absurd fool who had seen fit to have the disease in some

other country. And presently the doctor came and did his work and took

my last penny--my ten dollars which were the hard savings of nearly a

year and a half of labour and privation. Ah, if the law-makers had only

known there were plenty of doctors in the city glad of a chance to

vaccinate people for a dollar or two, they would never have put the price

up so high against a poor friendless Irish, or Italian, or Chinese pauper

fleeing to the good land to escape hunger and hard times.

AH SONG HI.

LETTER IV

SAN FRANCISCO, 18--.

DEAR CHING-FOO: I have been here about a month now, and am learning a

little of the language every day. My employer was disappointed in the

matter of hiring us out to service to the plantations in the far eastern

portion of this continent. His enterprise was a failure, and so he set

us all free, merely taking measures to secure to himself the repayment of

the passage money which he paid for us. We are to make this good to him

out of the first moneys we earn here. He says it is sixty dollars

apiece.

We were thus set free about two weeks after we reached here. We had been

massed together in some small houses up to that time, waiting. I walked

forth to seek my fortune. I was to begin life a stranger in a strange

land, without a friend, or a penny, or any clothes but those I had on my

back. I had not any advantage on my side in the world--not one, except

good health and the lack of any necessity to waste any time or anxiety on

the watching of my baggage. No, I forget. I reflected that I had one

prodigious advantage over paupers in other lands--I was in America! I

was in the heaven-provided refuge of the oppressed and the forsaken!

Just as that comforting thought passed through my mind, some young men

set a fierce dog on me. I tried to defend myself, but could do nothing.

I retreated to the recess of a closed doorway, and there the dog had me

at his mercy, flying at my throat and face or any part of my body that

presented itself. I shrieked for help, but the young men only jeered and

laughed. Two men in gray uniforms ( policemen is their official title)

looked on for a minute and then walked leisurely away. But a man stopped

them and brought them back and told them it was a shame to leave me in

such distress. Then the two policemen beat off the dog with small clubs,

and a comfort it was to be rid of him, though I was just rags and blood

from head to foot. The man who brought the policemen asked the young men

why they abused me in that way, and they said they didn't want any of his

meddling. And they said to him:

"This Ching divil comes till Ameriky to take the bread out o' dacent

intilligent white men's mouths, and whir they try to defind their rights

there's a dale o' fuss made about it."

They began to threaten my benefactor, and as he saw no friendliness in

the faces that had gathered meanwhile, he went on his way. He got many a

curse when he was gone. The policemen now told me I was under arrest and

must go with them. I asked one of them what wrong I had done to any one

that I should be arrested, and he only struck me with his club and

ordered me to "hold my yap." With a jeering crowd of street boys and

loafers at my heels, I was taken up an alley and into a stone-paved

dungeon which had large cells all down one side of it, with iron gates to

them. I stood up by a desk while a man behind it wrote down certain

things about me on a slate. One of my captors said:

"Enter a charge against this Chinaman of being disorderly and disturbing

the peace."

I attempted to say a word, but he said:

"Silence! Now ye had better go slow, my good fellow. This is two or

three times you've tried to get off some of your d---d insolence. Lip

won't do here. You've got to simmer down, and if you don't take to it

paceable we'll see if we can't make you. Fat's your name?"

"Ah Song Hi."

"Alias what?"

I said I did not understand, and he said what he wanted was my true name,

for he guessed I picked up this one since I stole my last chickens. They

all laughed loudly at that.

Then they searched me. They found nothing, of course. They seemed very

angry and asked who I supposed would "go my bail or pay my fine." When

they explained these things to me, I said I had done nobody any harm, and

why should I need to have bail or pay a fine? Both of them kicked me and

warned me that I would find it to my advantage to try and be as civil as

convenient. I protested that I had not meant anything disrespectful.

Then one of them took me to one side and said:

"Now look here, Johnny, it's no use you playing softly wid us. We mane

business, ye know; and the sooner ye put us on the scent of a V, the

asier yell save yerself from a dale of trouble. Ye can't get out o' this

for anny less. Who's your frinds?"

I told him I had not a single friend in all the land of America, and that

I was far from home and help, and very poor. And I begged him to let me

go.

He gathered the slack of my blouse collar in his grip and jerked and

shoved and hauled at me across the dungeon, and then unlocking an iron

cell-gate thrust me in with a kick and said:

"Rot there, ye furrin spawn, till ye lairn that there's no room in

America for the likes of ye or your nation."

AH SONG HI.

LETTER V

SAN FRANCISCO, 18--.

DEAR CHING-FOO: You will remember that I had just been thrust violently

into a cell in the city prison when I wrote last. I stumbled and fell on

some one. I got a blow and a curse= and on top of these a kick or two

and a shove. In a second or two it was plain that I was in a nest of

prisoners and was being "passed around"--for the instant I was knocked

out of the way of one I fell on the head or heels of another and was

promptly ejected, only to land on a third prisoner and get a new

contribution of kicks and curses and a new destination. I brought up at

last in an unoccupied corner, very much battered and bruised and sore,

but glad enough to be let alone for a little while. I was on the

flag-stones, for there was, no furniture in the den except a long, broad

board, or combination of boards, like a barn-door, and this bed was

accommodating five or six persons, and that was its full capacity. They

lay stretched side by side, snoring--when not fighting. One end of the

board was four, inches higher than the other, and so the slant answered

for a pillow. There were no blankets, and the night was a little chilly;

the nights are always a little chilly in San Francisco, though never

severely cold. The board was a deal more comfortable than the stones,

and occasionally some flag-stone plebeian like me would try to creep to a

place on it; and then the aristocrats would hammer him good and make him

think a flag pavement was a nice enough place after all.

I lay quiet in my corner, stroking my bruises, and listening to the

revelations the prisoners made to each other--and to me for some that

were near me talked to me a good deal. I had long had an idea that

Americans, being free, had no need of prisons, which are a contrivance of

despots for keeping restless patriots out of mischief. So I was

considerably surprised to find out my mistake.

Ours was a big general cell, it seemed, for the temporary accommodation

of all comers whose crimes were trifling. Among us they were two

Americans, two "Greasers" (Mexicans), a Frenchman, a German, four

Irishmen, a Chilenean (and, in the next cell, only separated from us by a

grating, two women), all drunk, and all more or less noisy; and as night

fell and advanced, they grew more and more discontented and disorderly,

occasionally; shaking the prison bars and glaring through them at the

slowly pacing officer, and cursing him with all their hearts. The two

women were nearly middle-aged, and they had only had enough liquor to

stimulate instead of stupefy them. Consequently they would fondle and

kiss each other for some minutes, and then fall to fighting and keep it

up till they were just two grotesque tangles of rags and blood and

tumbled hair. Then they would rest awhile and pant and swear. While

they were affectionate they always spoke of each other as "ladies," but

while they were fighting "strumpet" was the mildest name they could think

of--and they could only make that do by tacking some sounding profanity

to it. In their last fight, which was toward midnight, one of them bit

off the other's finger, and then the officer interfered and put the

"Greaser" into the "dark cell" to answer for it because the woman that

did it laid it on him, and the other woman did not deny it because, as

she said afterward, she "wanted another crack at the huzzy when her

finger quit hurting," and so she did not want her removed. By this time

those two women had mutilated each other's clothes to that extent that

there was not sufficient left to cover their nakedness. I found that one

of these creatures had spent nine years in the county jail, and that the

other one had spent about four or five years in the same place. They had

done it from choice. As soon as they were discharged from captivity they

would go straight and get drunk, and then steal some trifling thing while

an officer was observing them. That would entitle them to another two,

months in jail, and there they would occupy clean, airy apartments, and

have good food in plenty, and being at no expense at all, they, could

make shirts for the clothiers at half a dollar apiece and thus keep

themselves in smoking tobacco and such other luxuries as they wanted.

When the two months were up they would go just as straight as they could

walk to Mother Leonard's and get drunk; and from there to Kearney street

and steal something; and thence to this city prison, and next day back to

the old quarters in the county jail again. One of them had really kept

this up for nine years and the other four or five, and both said they

meant to end their days in that prison. **--[**The former of the two

did.--Ed. Men.]--Finally, both these creatures fell upon me while I was

dozing with my head against their grating, and battered me considerably,

because they discovered that I was a Chinaman, and they said I was "a

bloody interlopin' loafer come from the devil's own country to take the

bread out of dacent people's mouths and put down the wages for work whin

it was all a Christian could do to kape body and sowl together as it

was." "Loafer" means one who will not work.

AH SONG HI.

LETTER VI

SAN FRANCISCO, 18--.

DEAR CHING-FOO: To continue--the two women became reconciled to each

other again through the common bond of interest and sympathy created

between them by pounding me in partnership, and when they had finished me

they fell to embracing each other again and swearing more eternal

affection like that which had subsisted between them all the evening,

barring occasional interruptions. They agreed to swear the finger-biting

on the Greaser in open court, and get him sent to the penitentiary for

the crime of mayhem.

Another of our company was a boy of fourteen who had been watched for

some time by officers and teachers, and repeatedly detected in enticing

young girls from the public schools to the lodgings of gentlemen down

town. He had been furnished with lures in the form of pictures and

books of a peculiar kind, and these he had distributed among his clients.

There were likenesses of fifteen of these young girls on exhibition (only

to prominent citizens and persons in authority, it was said, though most

people came to get a sight) at the police headquarters, but no punishment

at all was to be inflicted on the poor little misses. The boy was

afterward sent into captivity at the House of Correction for some months,

and there was a strong disposition to punish the gentlemen who had

employed the boy to entice the girls, but as that could not be done

without making public the names of those gentlemen and thus injuring them

socially, the idea was finally given up.

There was also in our cell that night a photographer (a kind of artist

who makes likenesses of people with a machine), who had been for some

time patching the pictured heads of well-known and respectable young

ladies to the nude, pictured bodies of another class of women; then from

this patched creation he would make photographs and sell them privately

at high prices to rowdies and blackguards, averring that these, the best

young ladies of the city, had hired him to take their likenesses in that

unclad condition. What a lecture the police judge read that photographer

when he was convicted! He told him his crime was little less than an

outrage. He abused that photographer till he almost made him sink

through the floor, and then he fined him a hundred dollars. And he told

him he might consider himself lucky that he didn't fine him a hundred and

twenty-five dollars. They are awfully severe on crime here.

About two or two and a half hours after midnight, of that first

experience of mine in the city prison, such of us as were dozing were

awakened by a noise of beating and dragging and groaning, and in a little

while a man was pushed into our den with a "There, d---n you, soak there

a spell!"--and then the gate was closed and the officers went away again.

The man who was thrust among us fell limp and helpless by the grating,

but as nobody could reach him with a kick without the trouble of hitching

along toward him or getting fairly up to deliver it, our people only

grumbled at him, and cursed him, and called him insulting names--for

misery and hardship do not make their victims gentle or charitable toward

each other. But as he neither tried humbly to conciliate our people nor

swore back at them, his unnatural conduct created surprise, and several

of the party crawled to him where he lay in the dim light that came

through the grating, and examined into his case. His head was very

bloody and his wits were gone. After about an hour, he sat up and stared

around; then his eyes grew more natural and he began to tell how that he

was going along with a bag on his shoulder and a brace of policemen

ordered him to stop, which he did not do--was chased and caught, beaten

ferociously about the head on the way to the prison and after arrival

there, and finally I thrown into our den like a dog.

And in a few seconds he sank down again and grew flighty of speech. One

of our people was at last penetrated with something vaguely akin to

compassion, may be, for he looked out through the gratings at the

guardian officer, pacing to and fro, and said:

"Say, Mickey, this shrimp's goin' to die."

"Stop your noise!" was all the answer he got. But presently our man

tried it again. He drew himself to the gratings, grasping them with his

hands, and looking out through them, sat waiting till the officer was

passing once more, and then said:

"Sweetness, you'd better mind your eye, now, because you beats have

killed this cuss. You've busted his head and he'll pass in his checks

before sun-up. You better go for a doctor, now, you bet you had."

The officer delivered a sudden rap on our man's knuckles with his club,

that sent him scampering and howling among the sleeping forms on the

flag-stones, and an answering burst of laughter came from the half dozen

policemen idling about the railed desk in the middle of the dungeon.

But there was a putting of heads together out there presently, and a

conversing in low voices, which seemed to show that our man's talk had

made an impression; and presently an officer went away in a hurry, and

shortly came back with a person who entered our cell and felt the bruised

man's pulse and threw the glare of a lantern on his drawn face, striped

with blood, and his glassy eyes, fixed and vacant. The doctor examined

the man's broken head also, and presently said:

"If you'd called me an hour ago I might have saved this man, may be too

late now."

Then he walked out into the dungeon and the officers surrounded him, and

they kept up a low and earnest buzzing of conversation for fifteen

minutes, I should think, and then the doctor took his departure from the

prison. Several of the officers now came in and worked a little with the

wounded man, but toward daylight he died.

It was the longest, longest night! And when the daylight came filtering

reluctantly into the dungeon at last, it was the grayest, dreariest,

saddest daylight! And yet, when an officer by and by turned off the

sickly yellow gas flame, and immediately the gray of dawn became fresh

and white, there was a lifting of my spirits that acknowledged and

believed that the night was gone, and straightway I fell to stretching my

sore limbs, and looking about me with a grateful sense of relief and a

returning interest in life. About me lay the evidences that what seemed

now a feverish dream and a nightmare was the memory of a reality instead.

For on the boards lay four frowsy, ragged, bearded vagabonds, snoring

--one turned end-for-end and resting an unclean foot, in a ruined

stocking, on the hairy breast of a neighbour; the young boy was uneasy,

and lay moaning in his sleep; other forms lay half revealed and half

concealed about the floor; in the furthest corner the gray light fell

upon a sheet, whose elevations and depressions indicated the places of

the dead man's face and feet and folded hands; and through the dividing

bars one could discern the almost nude forms of the two exiles from the

county jail twined together in a drunken embrace, and sodden with sleep.

By and by all the animals in all the cages awoke, and stretched

themselves, and exchanged a few cuffs and curses, and then began to

clamour for breakfast. Breakfast was brought in at last--bread and

beefsteak on tin plates, and black coffee in tin cups, and no grabbing

allowed. And after several dreary hours of waiting, after this, we were

all marched out into the dungeon and joined there by all manner of

vagrants and vagabonds, of all shades and colours and nationalities, from

the other cells and cages of the place; and pretty soon our whole

menagerie was marched up-stairs and locked fast behind a high railing in

a dirty room with a dirty audience in it. And this audience stared at

us, and at a man seated on high behind what they call a pulpit in this

country, and at some clerks and other officials seated below him--and

waited. This was the police court.

The court opened. Pretty soon I was compelled to notice that a culprit's

nationality made for or against him in this court. Overwhelming proofs

were necessary to convict an Irishman of crime, and even then his

punishment amounted to little; Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Italians had

strict and unprejudiced justice meted out to them, in exact accordance

with the evidence; negroes were promptly punished, when there was the

slightest preponderance of testimony against them; but Chinamen were

punished always, apparently. Now this gave me some uneasiness, I

confess. I knew that this state of things must of necessity be

accidental, because in this country all men were free and equal, and one

person could not take to himself an advantage not accorded to all other

individuals. I knew that, and yet in spite of it I was uneasy.

And I grew still more uneasy, when I found that any succored and

befriended refugee from Ireland or elsewhere could stand up before that

judge and swear, away the life or liberty or character of a refugee from

China; but that by the law of the land the Chinaman could not testify

against the Irishman. I was really and truly uneasy, but still my faith

in the universal liberty that America accords and defends, and my deep

veneration for the land that offered all distressed outcasts a home and

protection, was strong within me, and I said to myself that it would all

come out right yet.

AH SONG HI.

LETTER VII

SAN FRANCISCO, 18--.

DEAR CHING FOO: I was glad enough when my case came up. An hour's

experience had made me as tired of the police court as of the dungeon.

I was not uneasy about the result of the trial, but on the contrary felt

that as soon as the large auditory of Americans present should hear how

that the rowdies had set the dogs on me when I was going peacefully along

the street, and how, when I was all torn and bleeding, the officers

arrested me and put me in jail and let the rowdies go free, the gallant

hatred of oppression which is part of the very flesh and blood of every

American would be stirred to its utmost, and I should be instantly set at

liberty. In truth I began to fear for the other side. There in full

view stood the ruffians who had misused me, and I began to fear that in

the first burst of generous anger occasioned by the revealment of what

they had done, they might be harshly handled, and possibly even banished

the country as having dishonoured her and being no longer worthy to

remain upon her sacred soil.

The official interpreter of the court asked my name, and then spoke it

aloud so that all could hear. Supposing that all was now ready, I

cleared my throat and began--in Chinese, because of my imperfect English:

"Hear, O high and mighty mandarin, and believe! As I went about my

peaceful business in the street, behold certain men set a dog on me,

and--

"Silence!"

It was the judge that spoke. The interpreter whispered to me that I must

keep perfectly still. He said that no statement would be received from

me--I must only talk through my lawyer.

I had no lawyer. In the early morning a police court lawyer (termed, in

the higher circles of society, a "shyster") had come into our den in the

prison and offered his services to me, but I had been obliged to go

without them because I could not pay in advance or give security. I told

the interpreter how the matter stood. He said I must take my chances on

the witnesses then. I glanced around, and my failing confidence revived.

"Call those four Chinamen yonder," I said. "They saw it all. I remember

their faces perfectly. They will prove that the white men set the dog on

me when I was not harming them."

"That won't work," said he. "In this country white men can testify

against Chinamen all they want to, but Chinamen ain't allowed to testify

against white men!"

What a chill went through me! And then I felt the indignant blood rise

to my cheek at this libel upon the Home of the Oppressed, where all men

are free and equal--perfectly equal--perfectly free and perfectly equal.

I despised this Chinese-speaking Spaniard for his mean slander of the

land that was sheltering and feeding him. I sorely wanted to sear his

eyes with that sentence from the great and good American Declaration of

Independence which we have copied in letters of gold in China and keep

hung up over our family altars and in our temples--I mean the one about

all men being created free and equal.

But woe is me, Ching Foo, the man was right. He was right, after all.

There were my witnesses, but I could not use them. But now came a new

hope. I saw my white friend come in, and I felt that he had come there

purposely to help me. I may almost say I knew it. So I grew easier.

He passed near enough to me to say under his breath, "Don't be afraid,"

and then I had no more fear. But presently the rowdies recognised him

and began to scowl at him in no friendly way, and to make threatening

signs at him. The two officers that arrested me fixed their eyes

steadily on his; he bore it well, but gave in presently, and dropped his

eyes. They still gazed at his eyebrows, and every time he raised his

eyes he encountered their winkless stare--until after a minute or two he

ceased to lift his head at all. The judge had been giving some

instructions privately to some one for a little while, but now he was

ready to resume business. Then the trial so unspeakably important to me,

and freighted with such prodigious consequence to my wife and children,

began, progressed, ended, was recorded in the books, noted down by the

newspaper reporters, and forgotten by everybody but me--all in the little

space of two minutes!

"Ah Song Hi, Chinaman. Officers O'Flannigan and O'Flaherty, witnesses.

Come forward, Officer O'Flannigan."

OFFICER--"He was making a disturbance in Kearny street."

JUDGE--"Any witnesses on the other side?" No response. The white friend

raised his eyes encountered Officer O'Flaherty's--blushed a little--got

up and left the courtroom, avoiding all glances and not taking his own

from the floor.

JUDGE--"Give him five dollars or ten days."

In my desolation there was a glad surprise in the words; but it passed

away when I found that he only meant that I was to be fined five dollars

or imprisoned ten days longer in default of it.

There were twelve or fifteen Chinamen in our crowd of prisoners, charged

with all manner of little thefts and misdemeanors, and their cases were

quickly disposed of, as a general thing. When the charge came from a

policeman or other white man, he made his statement and that was the end

of it, unless the Chinaman's lawyer could find some white person to

testify in his client's behalf, for, neither the accused Chinaman nor his

countrymen being allowed to say anything, the statement of the officers

or other white person was amply sufficient to convict. So, as I said,

the Chinamen's cases were quickly disposed of, and fines and imprisonment

promptly distributed among them. In one or two of the cases the charges

against Chinamen were brought by Chinamen themselves, and in those cases

Chinamen testified against Chinamen, through the interpreter; but the

fixed rule of the court being that the preponderance of testimony in such

cases should determine the prisoner's guilt or innocence, and there being

nothing very binding about an oath administered to the lower orders of

our people without the ancient solemnity of cutting off a chicken's head

and burning some yellow paper at the same time, the interested parties

naturally drum up a cloud of witnesses who are cheerfully willing to give

evidence without ever knowing anything about the matter in hand. The

judge has a custom of rattling through with as much of this testimony as

his patience will stand, and then shutting off the rest and striking an

average.

By noon all the business of the court was finished, and then several of

us who had not fared well were remanded to prison; the judge went home;

the lawyers, and officers, and spectators departed their several ways,

and left the uncomely court-room to silence, solitude, and Stiggers, the

newspaper reporter, which latter would now write up his items (said an

ancient Chinaman to me), in the which he would praise all the policemen

indiscriminately and abuse the Chinamen and dead people.

AH SONG HI.

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HOW TO TELL A STORY AND OTHERS

by Mark Twain

CONTENTS:

HOW TO TELL A STORY

THE WOUNDED SOLDIER

THE GOLDEN ARM

MENTAL TELEGRAPHY AGAIN

THE INVALIDS STORY

HOW TO TELL A STORY

The Humorous Story an American Development.--Its Difference

from Comic and Witty Stories.

I do not claim that I can tell a story as it ought to be told. I only

claim to know how a story ought to be told, for I have been almost daily

in the company of the most expert story-tellers for many years.

There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind--the

humorous. I will talk mainly about that one. The humorous story is

American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The

humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling;

the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.

The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around

as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the comic

and witty stories must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story

bubbles gently along, the others burst.

The humorous story is strictly a work of art--high and delicate art

--and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the

comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The art of telling a

humorous story--understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print--was

created in America, and has remained at home.

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal

the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about

it; but the teller of the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one

of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with eager

delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through. And

sometimes, if he has had good success, he is so glad and happy that he

will repeat the "nub" of it and glance around from face to face,

collecting applause, and then repeat it again. It is a pathetic thing to

see.

Very often, of course, the rambling and disjointed humorous story

finishes with a nub, point, snapper, or whatever you like to call it.

Then the listener must be alert, for in many cases the teller will divert

attention from that nub by dropping it in a carefully casual and

indifferent way, with the pretence that he does not know it is a nub.

Artemus Ward used that trick a good deal; then when the belated audience

presently caught the joke he would look up with innocent surprise, as if

wondering what they had found to laugh at. Dan Setchell used it before

him, Nye and Riley and others use it to-day.

But the teller of the comic story does not slur the nub; he shouts it at

you--every time. And when he prints it, in England, France, Germany, and

Italy, he italicizes it, puts some whooping exclamation-points after it,

and sometimes explains it in a parenthesis. All of which is very

depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life.

Let me set down an instance of the comic method, using an anecdote which

has been popular all over the world for twelve or fifteen hundred years.

The teller tells it in this way:

THE WOUNDED SOLDIER.

In the course of a certain battle a soldier whose leg had been shot off

appealed to another soldier who was hurrying by to carry him to the rear,

informing him at the same time of the loss which he had sustained;

whereupon the generous son of Mars, shouldering the unfortunate,

proceeded to carry out his desire. The bullets and cannon-balls were

flying in all directions, and presently one of the latter took the

wounded man's head off--without, however, his deliverer being aware of

it. In no-long time he was hailed by an officer, who said:

"Where are you going with that carcass?"

"To the rear, sir--he's lost his leg!"

"His leg, forsooth?" responded the astonished officer; "you mean his

head, you booby."

Whereupon the soldier dispossessed himself of his burden, and stood

looking down upon it in great perplexity. At length he said:

"It is true, sir, just as you have said." Then after a pause he added,

"But he TOLD me IT WAS HIS LEG! ! ! ! !"

Here the narrator bursts into explosion after explosion of thunderous

horse-laughter, repeating that nub from time to time through his gaspings

and shriekings and suffocatings.

It takes only a minute and a half to tell that in its comic-story form;

and isn't worth the telling, after all. Put into the humorous-story form

it takes ten minutes, and is about the funniest thing I have ever

listened to--as James Whitcomb Riley tells it.

He tells it in the character of a dull-witted old farmer who has just

heard it for the first time, thinks it is unspeakably funny, and is

trying to repeat it to a neighbor. But he can't remember it; so he gets

all mixed up and wanders helplessly round and round, putting in tedious

details that don't belong in the tale and only retard it; taking them out

conscientiously and putting in others that are just as useless; making

minor mistakes now and then and stopping to correct them and explain how

he came to make them; remembering things which he forgot to put in in

their proper place and going back to put them in there; stopping his

narrative a good while in order to try to recall the name of the soldier

that was hurt, and finally remembering that the soldier's name was not

mentioned, and remarking placidly that the name is of no real importance,

anyway--better, of course, if one knew it, but not essential, after all

--and so on, and so on, and so on.

The teller is innocent and happy and pleased with himself, and has to

stop every little while to hold himself in and keep from laughing

outright; and does hold in, but his body quakes in a jelly-like way with

interior chuckles; and at the end of the ten minutes the audience have

laughed until they are exhausted, and the tears are running down their

faces.

The simplicity and innocence and sincerity and unconsciousness of the old

farmer are perfectly simulated, and the result is a performance which is

thoroughly charming and delicious. This is art and fine and beautiful,

and only a master can compass it; but a machine could tell the other

story.

To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and

sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are

absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.

Another feature is the slurring of the point. A third is the dropping of

a studied remark apparently without knowing it, as if one were thinking

aloud. The fourth and last is the pause.

Artemus Ward dealt in numbers three and four a good deal. He would begin

to tell with great animation something which he seemed to think was

wonderful; then lose confidence, and after an apparently absent-minded

pause add an incongruous remark in a soliloquizing way; and that was the

remark intended to explode the mine--and it did.

For instance, he would say eagerly, excitedly, "I once knew a man in New

Zealand who hadn't a tooth in his head"--here his animation would die

out; a silent, reflective pause would follow, then he would say dreamily,

and as if to himself, "and yet that man could beat a drum better than any

man I ever saw."

The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a

frequently recurring feature, too. It is a dainty thing, and delicate,

and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right

length--no more and no less--or it fails of its purpose and makes

trouble. If the pause is too short the impressive point is passed, and

[and if too long] the audience have had time to divine that a surprise is

intended--and then you can't surprise them, of course.

On the platform I used to tell a negro ghost story that had a pause in

front of the snapper on the end, and that pause was the most important

thing in the whole story. If I got it the right length precisely, I

could spring the finishing ejaculation with effect enough to make some

impressible girl deliver a startled little yelp and jump out of her seat

--and that was what I was after. This story was called "The Golden Arm,"

and was told in this fashion. You can practise with it yourself--and

mind you look out for the pause and get it right.

THE GOLDEN ARM.

Once 'pon a time dey wuz a monsus mean man, en he live 'way out in de

prairie all 'lone by hisself, 'cep'n he had a wife. En bimeby she died,

en he tuck en toted her way out dah in de prairie en buried her. Well,

she had a golden arm--all solid gold, fum de shoulder down. He wuz

pow'ful mean--pow'ful; en dat night he couldn't sleep, Gaze he want dat

golden arm so bad.

When it come midnight he couldn't stan' it no mo'; so he git up, he did,

en tuck his lantern en shoved out thoo de storm en dug her up en got de

golden arm; en he bent his head down 'gin de win', en plowed en plowed en

plowed thoo de snow. Den all on a sudden he stop (make a considerable

pause here, and look startled, and take a listening attitude) en say:

"My LAN', what's dat!"

En he listen--en listen--en de win' say (set your teeth together and

imitate the wailing and wheezing singsong of the wind), "Bzzz-z-zzz"

--en den, way back yonder whah de grave is, he hear a voice! he hear a

voice all mix' up in de win' can't hardly tell 'em 'part--" Bzzz-zzz

--W-h-o--g-o-t--m-y--g-o-l-d-e-n arm? --zzz--zzz-- W-h-o g-o-t m-y

g-o-l-d-e-n arm!" (You must begin to shiver violently now.)

En he begin to shiver en shake, en say, "Oh, my! OH, my lan'! "en de

win' blow de lantern out, en de snow en sleet blow in his face en mos'

choke him, en he start a-plowin' knee-deep towards home mos' dead, he so

sk'yerd--en pooty soon he hear de voice agin, en (pause) it 'us comin'

after him! "Bzzz--zzz--zzz--W-h-o--g-o-t m-y--g-o-l-d-e-n--arm?"

When he git to de pasture he hear it agin closter now, en a-comin'!

--a-comin' back dah in de dark en de storm--(repeat the wind and the

voice). When he git to de house he rush up-stairs en jump in de bed en

kiver up, head and years, en lay dah shiverin' en shakin'--en den way out

dah he hear it agin!--en a-comin'! En bimeby he hear (pause--awed,

listening attitude)--pat--pat--pat--hit's acomin' up-stairs! Den he

hear de latch, en he know it's in de room!

Den pooty soon he know it's a-stannin' by de bed! (Pause.) Den--he know

it's a-bendin' down over him--en he cain't skasely git his breath! Den

--den--he seem to feel someth' n c-o-l-d, right down 'most agin his head!

(Pause.)

Den de voice say, right at his year--"W-h-o g-o-t--m-y--g-o-l-d-e-n

arm?" (You must wail it out very plaintively and accusingly; then you

stare steadily and impressively into the face of the farthest-gone

auditor--a girl, preferably--and let that awe-inspiring pause begin to

build itself in the deep hush. When it has reached exactly the right

length, jump suddenly at that girl and yell, "You've got it!")

If you've got the pause right, she'll fetch a dear little yelp and spring

right out of her shoes. But you must get the pause right; and you will

find it the most troublesome and aggravating and uncertain thing you ever

undertook.

MENTAL TELEGRAPHY AGAIN

I have three or four curious incidents to tell about. They seem to come

under the head of what I named "Mental Telegraphy" in a paper written

seventeen years ago, and published long afterwards.--[The paper entitled

"Mental Telegraphy," which originally appeared in Harper's Magazine for

December, 1893, is included in the volume entitled The American Claimant

and Other Stories and Sketches.]

Several years ago I made a campaign on the platform with Mr. George W.

Cable. In Montreal we were honored with a reception. It began at two in

the afternoon in a long drawing-room in the Windsor Hotel. Mr. Cable and

I stood at one end of this room, and the ladies and gentlemen entered it

at the other end, crossed it at that end, then came up the long left-hand

side, shook hands with us, said a word or two, and passed on, in the

usual way. My sight is of the telescopic sort, and I presently

recognized a familiar face among the throng of strangers drifting in at

the distant door, and I said to myself, with surprise and high

gratification, "That is Mrs. R.; I had forgotten that she was a

Canadian." She had been a great friend of mine in Carson City, Nevada,

in the early days. I had not seen her or heard of her for twenty years;

I had not been thinking about her; there was nothing to suggest her to

me, nothing to bring her to my mind; in fact, to me she had long ago

ceased to exist, and had disappeared from my consciousness. But I knew

her instantly; and I saw her so clearly that I was able to note some of

the particulars of her dress, and did note them, and they remained

in my mind. I was impatient for her to come. In the midst of the

hand-shakings I snatched glimpses of her and noted her progress with the

slow-moving file across the end of the room; then I saw her start up the

side, and this gave me a full front view of her face. I saw her last

when she was within twenty-five feet of me. For an hour I kept thinking

she must still be in the room somewhere and would come at last, but I was

disappointed.

When I arrived in the lecture-hall that evening some one said: "Come into

the waiting-room; there's a friend of yours there who wants to see you.

You'll not be introduced--you are to do the recognizing without help if

you can."

I said to myself: "It is Mrs. R.; I shan't have any trouble."

There were perhaps ten ladies present, all seated. In the midst of them

was Mrs. R., as I had expected. She was dressed exactly as she was when

I had seen her in the afternoon. I went forward and shook hands with her

and called her by name, and said:

"I knew you the moment you appeared at the reception this afternoon."

She looked surprised, and said: "But I was not at the reception. I have

just arrived from Quebec, and have not been in town an hour."

It was my turn to be surprised now. I said: "I can't help it. I give

you my word of honor that it is as I say. I saw you at the reception,

and you were dressed precisely as you are now. When they told me a

moment ago that I should find a friend in this room, your image rose

before me, dress and all, just as I had seen you at the reception."

Those are the facts. She was not at the reception at all, or anywhere

near it; but I saw her there nevertheless, and most clearly and

unmistakably. To that I could make oath. How is one to explain this? I

was not thinking of her at the time; had not thought of her for years.

But she had been thinking of me, no doubt; did her thoughts flit through

leagues of air to me, and bring with it that clear and pleasant vision of

herself? I think so. That was and remains my sole experience in the

matter of apparitions--I mean apparitions that come when one is

(ostensibly) awake. I could have been asleep for a moment; the

apparition could have been the creature of a dream. Still, that is

nothing to the point; the feature of interest is the happening of the

thing just at that time, instead of at an earlier or later time, which is

argument that its origin lay in thought-transference.

My next incident will be set aside by most persons as being merely

a "coincidence," I suppose. Years ago I used to think sometimes of

making a lecturing trip through the antipodes and the borders of the

Orient, but always gave up the idea, partly because of the great length

of the journey and partly because my wife could not well manage to go

with me. Towards the end of last January that idea, after an interval of

years, came suddenly into my head again--forcefully, too, and without any

apparent reason. Whence came it? What suggested it? I will touch upon

that presently.

I was at that time where I am now--in Paris. I wrote at once to Henry M.

Stanley (London), and asked him some questions about his Australian

lecture tour, and inquired who had conducted him and what were the terms.

After a day or two his answer came. It began:

"The lecture agent for Australia and New Zealand is par

excellence Mr. R. S. Smythe, of Melbourne."

He added his itinerary, terms, sea expenses, and some other matters, and

advised me to write Mr. Smythe, which I did--February 3d. I began my

letter by saying in substance that while he did not know me personally we

had a mutual friend in Stanley, and that would answer for an

introduction. Then I proposed my trip, and asked if he would give me the

same terms which he had given Stanley.

I mailed my letter to Mr. Smythe February 6th, and three days later I got

a letter from the selfsame Smythe, dated Melbourne, December 17th. I

would as soon have expected to get a letter from the late George

Washington. The letter began somewhat as mine to him had begun--with a

self-introduction:

"DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--It is so long since Archibald Forbes and I

spent that pleasant afternoon in your comfortable house at

Hartford that you have probably quite forgotten the occasion."

In the course of his letter this occurs:

"I am willing to give you" [here he named the terms which he

had given Stanley] "for an antipodean tour to last, say, three

months."

Here was the single essential detail of my letter answered three days

after I had mailed my inquiry. I might have saved myself the trouble and

the postage--and a few years ago I would have done that very thing, for I

would have argued that my sudden and strong impulse to write and ask some

questions of a stranger on the under side of the globe meant that the

impulse came from that stranger, and that he would answer my questions of

his own motion if I would let him alone.

Mr. Smythe's letter probably passed under my nose on its way to lose

three weeks traveling to America and back, and gave me a whiff of its

contents as it went along. Letters often act like that. Instead of the

thought coming to you in an instant from Australia, the (apparently)

unsentient letter imparts it to you as it glides invisibly past your

elbow in the mail-bag.

Next incident. In the following month--March--I was in America. I spent

a Sunday at Irvington-on-the-Hudson with Mr. John Brisben Walker, of the

Cosmopolitan magazine. We came into New York next morning, and went to

the Century Club for luncheon. He said some praiseful things about the

character of the club and the orderly serenity and pleasantness of its

quarters, and asked if I had never tried to acquire membership in it.

I said I had not, and that New York clubs were a continuous expense to

the country members without being of frequent use or benefit to them.

"And now I've got an idea!" said I. "There's the Lotos--the first New

York club I was ever a member of--my very earliest love in that line.

I have been a member of it for considerably more than twenty years, yet

have seldom had a chance to look in and see the boys. They turn gray and

grow old while I am not watching. And my dues go on. I am going to

Hartford this afternoon for a day or two, but as soon as I get back I

will go to John Elderkin very privately and say: 'Remember the veteran

and confer distinction upon him, for the sake of old times. Make me an

honorary member and abolish the tax. If you haven't any such thing as

honorary membership, all the better--create it for my honor and glory.'

That would be a great thing; I will go to John Elderkin as soon as I get

back from Hartford."

I took the last express that afternoon, first telegraphing Mr. F. G.

Whitmore to come and see me next day. When he came he asked: "Did you

get a letter from Mr. John Elderkin, secretary of the Lotos Club, before

you left New York?"

"Then it just missed you. If I had known you were coming I would have

kept it. It is beautiful, and will make you proud. The Board of

Directors, by unanimous vote, have made you a life member, and squelched

those dues; and, you are to be on hand and receive your distinction on

the night of the 30th, which is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the

founding of the club, and it will not surprise me if they have some great

times there."

What put the honorary membership in my head that day in the Century Club?

for I had never thought of it before. I don't know what brought the

thought to me at that particular time instead of earlier, but I am well

satisfied that it originated with the Board of Directors, and had been on

its way to my brain through the air ever since the moment that saw their

vote recorded.

Another incident. I was in Hartford two or three days as a guest of the

Rev. Joseph H. Twichell. I have held the rank of Honorary Uncle to his

children for a quarter of a century, and I went out with him in the

trolley-car to visit one of my nieces, who is at Miss Porter's famous

school in Farmington. The distance is eight or nine miles. On the way,

talking, I illustrated something with an anecdote. This is the anecdote:

Two years and a half ago I and the family arrived at Milan on our way to

Rome, and stopped at the Continental. After dinner I went below and took

a seat in the stone-paved court, where the customary lemon-trees stand in

the customary tubs, and said to myself, "Now this is comfort, comfort and

repose, and nobody to disturb it; I do not know anybody in Milan."

Then a young gentleman stepped up and shook hands, which damaged my

theory. He said, in substance:

"You won't remember me, Mr. Clemens, but I remember you very well. I was

a cadet at West Point when you and Rev. Joseph H. Twichell came there

some years ago and talked to us on a Hundredth Night. I am a lieutenant

in the regular army now, and my name is H. I am in Europe, all alone,

for a modest little tour; my regiment is in Arizona."

We became friendly and sociable, and in the course of the talk he told me

of an adventure which had befallen him--about to this effect:

"I was at Bellagio, stopping at the big hotel there, and ten days ago I

lost my letter of credit. I did not know what in the world to do. I was

a stranger; I knew no one in Europe; I hadn't a penny in my pocket; I

couldn't even send a telegram to London to get my lost letter replaced;

my hotel bill was a week old, and the presentation of it imminent--so

imminent that it could happen at any moment now. I was so frightened

that my wits seemed to leave me. I tramped and tramped, back and forth,

like a crazy person. If anybody approached me I hurried away, for no

matter what a person looked like, I took him for the head waiter with the

bill.

"I was at last in such a desperate state that I was ready to do any wild

thing that promised even the shadow of help, and so this is the insane

thing that I did. I saw a family lunching at a small table on the

veranda, and recognized their nationality--Americans--father, mother, and

several young daughters--young, tastefully dressed, and pretty--the rule

with our people. I went straight there in my civilian costume, named my

name, said I was a lieutenant in the army, and told my story and asked

for help.

"What do you suppose the gentleman did? But you would not guess in

twenty years. He took out a handful of gold coin and told me to help

myself--freely. That is what he did."

The next morning the lieutenant told me his new letter of credit had

arrived in the night, so we strolled to Cook's to draw money to pay back

the benefactor with. We got it, and then went strolling through the

great arcade. Presently he said, "Yonder they are; come and be

introduced." I was introduced to the parents and the young ladies; then

we separated, and I never saw him or them any m---

"Here we are at Farmington," said Twichell, interrupting.

We left the trolley-car and tramped through the mud a hundred yards or so

to the school, talking about the time we and Warner walked out there

years ago, and the pleasant time we had.

We had a visit with my niece in the parlor, then started for the trolley

again. Outside the house we encountered a double rank of twenty or

thirty of Miss Porter's young ladies arriving from a walk, and we stood

aside, ostensibly to let them have room to file past, but really to look

at them. Presently one of them stepped out of the rank and said:

"You don't know me, Mr. Twichell; but I know your daughter, and that

gives me the privilege of shaking hands with you."

Then she put out her hand to me, and said:

"And I wish to shake hands with you too, Mr. Clemens. You don't remember

me, but you were introduced to me in the arcade in Milan two years and a

half ago by Lieutenant H."

What had put that story into my head after all that stretch of time? Was

it just the proximity of that young girl, or was it merely an odd

accident?

THE INVALID'S STORY

I seem sixty and married, but these effects are due to my condition and

sufferings, for I am a bachelor, and only forty-one. It will be hard for

you to believe that I, who am now but a shadow, was a hale, hearty man

two short years ago, a man of iron, a very athlete!--yet such is the

simple truth. But stranger still than this fact is the way in which I

lost my health. I lost it through helping to take care of a box of guns

on a two-hundred-mile railway journey one winter's night. It is the

actual truth, and I will tell you about it.