their hands. Twice I thought I would give up and let the thing go; so twice I started to leave, but immediately I thought what a figure I should cut stepping out amongst the redeemed in such a rig, and that made me hang back and come to anchor again. People got to eying me – clerks, you know – wondering why I didn’t get under way. I couldn’t stand this long – it was too uncomfortable. So at last I plucked up courage and tipped the head clerk a signal. He says:
“What! you here yet? What’s wanting?”
Says I, in a low voice and very confidential, making a trumpet with my hands at his ear,
“I beg pardon, and you mustn’t mind my reminding you, and seeming to meddle, but hain’t you forgot something?”
He studied a second, and says:
“Forgot something? . . . No, not that I know of.”
“Think,” says I.
He thought. Then he says:
“No, I can’t seem to have forgot anything. What is it?”
“Look at me,” says I, “look me all over.”
He done it.
“Well?” says he.
“Well,” says I, “you don’t notice anything? If I branched out amongst the elect looking like this, wouldn’t I attract considerable attention? – wouldn’t I be a little conspicuous?”
“Well,” he says, “I don’t see anything the matter. What do you lack?”
“Lack! Why, I lack my harp, and my wreath, and my halo, and my hymn-book, and my palm branch – I lack everything that a body naturally requires up here, my friend.”
Puzzled? Peters, he was the worst puzzled man you ever saw. Finally he says,
“Well, you seem to be a curiosity every way a body takes you. I never heard of these things before.”
I looked at the man awhile in solid astonishment; then I says:
“Now, I hope you don’t take it as an offense, 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-bye; 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
