The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Asbestos Society Of Sinners , by Lawrence Daniel Fogg.

Dedicated to
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
Who first made Hades a pleasant place of abode and aroused
in his reader a desire to go cruising on the Styx

JOHN KENDRICK BANGS, House-boat-on-the-Styx, care The Century Association, New York—Perhaps you, as self-elected jester at the court of the Son of the Morning, will wonder that a newspaper man should deliberately set out on a pilgrimage to Hades. I have often been told I ought to go there, but I pause on the banks of the Styx for reflection ere I rush in where all but fools fear to tread. Yet in mirroring forth the doings of the diocese of Bishop Beelzebub, I shall cast no reflections save on the dead, who can reflect no more, and like that other clown, more famous than I, will “use the devil himself with courtesy.” Having been an iconoclast, and as it is only a step from the breaking of idols to the smashing of trusts, I have had the temerity to dream of ending the monopoly of the particular section of the universe hitherto sacred to Lucifer and Bangs. As you have a copyright on Hades, you could make it hot for me if I invaded your territory without permission, so I ask you for a “dead head” pass. I don’t claim more than my rightful share; there will still be room enough for both of us to roast chestnuts on the other side of the Styx.

Pardon this discomfiture of sense by nonsense, yet I am not going to make an excuse for this abuse of absurdities, for what is nonsense but the flower of sense, the wine of wit, the harmony of humor sounded by an organ crankless, the pipe of Pan replaced by one of briar wood? But as Princess Scheherazade might have said: “That’s another kind of a smoke as well as another kind of a story.” Even in this “Stygian Nights’ Entertainment,” I cannot hope to equal her record of a “Thousand Nights and One”—whether I mean spent in story-telling or smoking in Hades I leave to your imagination. But then, I am not a woman!

As Hell has ceased to have a place in theology, there is no reason why the devil should not get his due in fiction. Emigration will set his way as soon as the character of the Cimmerian climate becomes definitely ascertained, but my trip to Hades will be more than a climatological tour. While in the interest of science, my subterranean explorations ought to point a pun and tangle a tale.

Your “farthest south” was to the Styx. I shall not linger there, but if I can elude Cerberus, I shall slip through the gates where we are told to “abandon hope,” and take up my habitation in Hades, with daily commutation to New York. Methinks the inquisitor of the fountain pen ought to have as much fun from a frolic with the heroes of history in their present abode as the inquisitor of the fork and flame.

Nor do I fear that this Stygian sequel to “the history that is written” will be shunned as something sacrilegious, for the average American is so generous regarding bookmakers that he will buy anything, concerning anything, at any time and in any place. He will not even register a protest on the ledger of the Hotel Hereafter!

If you will permit a newspaper man to go on a second “Pursuit of the Houseboat,” I would like to dedicate this account of a trip to the playground of Pluto to the man who blazed the way to Hell. May I have a shady corner in Hades, with the degree—three above zero—of A. S. S., meaning, of course, member of the Asbestos Society of Sinners?

Till death do us unite beyond the Styx, and assuring you of a warm reception, weatherwise and otherwise, when you too shall get a summons from Satan, believe me, happy to go

Castle Craig,
The Hanging Hills,
Meriden, Connecticut.
All Fools’ Day (April 1).

My dear Mr. Fogg—Although many critics have given me Hades, I have never recorded any exclusive claim to its possession. You are therefore wholly at liberty to go there yourself—for literary purposes only, I hope—in so far as I am concerned. As for the dedication, I feel highly honored and send you my most cordial thanks for the compliment.

WHILE waiting for an assignment, in the local room of the New York Universe, I began to while away the time by reading the fulsome effusions of the press agent of Greater Luna Park. They aroused in me the spirit of covetousness—I envied the press agent his vocabulary, which put the supply of superlatives into bankruptcy; and I was jealous of the success of Thompson & Dundy, whom I hoped some day to rival. Their first success had come with “A Trip to the Moon;” why might not I—

“Go to Hell,” I read on the paper which the “copy” boy just then thrust into my hand. Before I could question him, the “devil” had gone.

I glanced suspiciously at my fellow-scribes to see who had perpetrated the joke, if such it was, but no one seemed to be watching what effect the command had upon me. I again examined the odd message. It was in the handwriting of Mr.[Pg 4] Burroughs, the city editor, so to him I went. Holding out the slip of paper, I said:

“I have just received an assignment to ‘cover’ a certain subterranean resort named after the box in which printers throw battered type, but as the route there is unfamiliar, I have come to you for instructions.”

The “czar” of the city room frowned, but on reading the missive the frown was succeeded by an amused smile.

“That is evident from its contents. It must have been that new boy Jake, who took the slip off my desk when a telephone call interrupted me as I was writing. Had I completed the message it would have read ‘Go to Hellgate.’ A wreck has just occurred there and our marine reporter has telephoned for assistance. However, you are aware that I have made it a rule never to change an assignment. I make no exception in your case to-night.”

“Remember also that this paper never accepts an excuse. You must either hand in your story or your resignation. Perhaps I ought to explain further, though the Universe has no place for the newspaper man who cannot achieve the impossible or for the reporter who wants a reason for what he is told to do. We want men who can[Pg 5] carry ‘a message to Garcia’—or to Lucifer, if need be.

“The ting-a-ling of my desk telephone at the psychological moment when I had unconsciously consigned you to a colder climate than that of New York, was a summons from Satan. Why it didn’t come through the medium of the ‘printer’s devil’ is a mystery, unless His Majesty desired to show me that he is up-to-date in having a system of telephones installed by a famous electrician who recently crossed his wires and the Styx. I tried to transfer him to the managing editor by telling him that he had got a wrong connection, as my jurisdiction is limited, but he assured me that Hades is less than a hundred miles from New York, which makes me responsible for what happens there! Not a very pleasant thought, is it?

“Lucifer wants you to go to Cimmeria and interview Henry the Eighth. His much-married Majesty is angry at the liberties the historical novelists have taken with his wives and wants to divorce himself of his wrath through the columns of the Universe. Satan also wishes us to decide a dispute between Adam and Methuselah as to whom is the oldest inhabitant.”

“Don’t say it,” warned the city editor. “That word is always expressed by a blank in the paper, so you might as well leave it blank in your speech.[Pg 6] Besides, to say it would be justification for keeping you down there, and we want that interview without fail, even if you have to write it on asbestos and deliver it to mortals at a seance of the Society for Psychic Research. We want the work well done, so you will have to take your chances of being scorched.

“Discussions regarding Hades have waxed almost as hot as the subject of dispute itself. Most people believe it is built on the Turkish bath plan with departments of varying temperature. Those are the kind of people who swallow the thermometer of Dr. Doubt and die by degrees. If you find it as pleasant as John Kendrick Bangs did, you will want to stay and join the Stygian smart set, so I’ll transfer your insurance from the Equality to the Rock of Gibraltar and see to it that your sister does not starve or freeze, whatever may be the climatic fate of her brother.

“Don’t take the subway route to the under world, for then your chances of coming back would be grounded. You are to take the Twenty-third Street Ferry for the Jersey shore. New York and Hell are said to be convertible terms, but I’ve never before heard New Jersey given that distinction. However, Bangs says that’s the route, and as he plays golf with good intentions over there every summer, he ought to know.

“Don’t take any baggage, except perhaps your sister’s sunshade, as only shades and shady characters are permitted to cross the River Styx. You[Pg 7] more nearly come under the second category than any other member of the staff, so I have chosen you. As you may need ‘money to burn,’ call on the cashier for a ‘sinking fund’ before you start on your journey.

“By-the-by, while you are in Hades you might ask John Paul Jones whether he would prefer burial in New York, Washington, Annapolis, Philadelphia or Ocean Grove. That would be a ‘scoop’ worth more than the marital intemperance of the Mormon king. Get his signature so that if ‘our friends, the enemy,’ cry fake we can show them ‘what’s in a name.’ As Mr. Bangs, by the exercise of his imagination, was enabled to penetrate the Stygian regions, a newspaper man should have no difficulty in doing likewise by the exercise of his nerve; but if Charon bars the gate owing to your being still in the flesh, this will admit you. It’s a skeleton key.”

Half an hour later I stood on the deck of a ferryboat which was plowing the waters of the North River. Obedience to the commands of the “czar” of the city room soon becomes second nature to a newspaper man, and I had often boasted that I would go anywhere on earth or under the earth if sent there by Mr. Burroughs. I squared my shoulders to the breeze from the bay and resolved that I would not fail now that I had been put to the test, even if—A shudder finished the sentence; my mind stood palsied as I faced the Unknown.

It was a night of Stygian blackness, just the one to be chosen for such a dark mission. We were now nearing the Jersey shore and could hear the lap of the waves on the piling in the slip. A blaze of light astern showed that one of the boats was on its return trip. The hands of the clock on the ferry building pointed to midnight.

Out of the inky blackness suddenly loomed a great battleship which struck as much terror to our hearts as if it had been the Flying Dutchman. Had it been a merchantman we should have thought it was indeed the famous phantom ship, for it displayed no lights and the decks were deserted. Our captain signalled to reverse engines, but the order came too late. The two vessels collided with a mighty crash. There was a rending of timbers, an inrushing of water, a cry of despair from the passengers, then a stampede for the life preservers.

I had no sooner got a cork belt properly adjusted, as I thought, than the ferryboat sank. The suction drew me down and down and down; then I shot up to the surface again, feet foremost. I expected that the life belt would right me as soon as I came to the surface, but as I continued to hang head downward, the awful truth flashed over me—the belt had not been sufficiently tightened under my arms and had slipped down. Convulsively I struggled, but in the effort only succeeded in swallowing more water. The blur[Pg 9] of a thousand lights danced before my eyes in the floating bubbles of the phosphorescent water, a roar as of a mighty artillery thundered in my ears—then all became a blank; in newspaper parlance, I had ceased to be “live matter.”

That sinking fund with which I had provided myself before leaving the mundane earth must have carried me a long distance downward, for when I opened my eyes I was upon the banks of the River Styx. Presently Charon’s yacht came in sight. There was no one on board but Captain Charon himself, for with the exception of Lazarus, John Kendrick Bangs, and myself, no round trip tickets have ever been issued to Hades.

“Step lively, please,” yelled Charon, who had evidently been a Broadway trolley conductor earlier in his career. His success in knocking down fares had prompted Satan to employ him to transfer “fares” over the River Styx. The American invasion has extended downward as well as outward. To hear the motto of New York on the banks of the Styx made me feel quite at home, especially when Charon added: “Plenty of room up front.”

A number of shades had stepped aboard the yacht. I was following them when Charon halted me.

“Stop your whistling,” he commanded. “Do you think this is a Sunday school picnic or a political rally? I don’t believe you are eligible[Pg 10] for the journey, anyway. Hades is the only place within the fifty-mile limit that is not a side show for New York tourists. This yacht transports shades only.”

“Well, you see,” I began hesitatingly, “Lorimer says clothes don’t make the man, but that they make three-fourths of him, and this suit is of the very latest shade of blue.”

“I’ve been told gray is fashionable just now,” he commented, critically. “Everybody in Hades has the blues, so you won’t be off color,” he added, somewhat mollified.

“Then you know my ancestors are all shades,” I pleaded, “and our city editor says I have a shady reputation.”

“A newspaper man!” Charon gasped, his face growing pale. “I’ll have to let you come aboard, or you will go back and ‘roast’ me, and I get all the ‘roasting’ I can stand in Hades between trips. A newspaper man! “Nuff said. Jump aboard.”

“Everyone nowadays asks that fool question,” Charon retorted, angrily. “I believe John Bangs, like George Eliot, is a woman, for he can’t keep a secret, while Harper & Brothers offer him royalties for it. Shortly after the ‘Pursuit of the House-boat’ that craft disappeared from the river and Sherlock Holmes with it. He went back to haunt Conan Doyle, I guess. I hope he won’t come[Pg 11] back again in a hurry, for he made no end of trouble with his inferences and his deductions.”

“No more questions, if you please. I am not on the witness stand, nor will I consent to be interviewed. Besides, talking is an infraction of the rules of the Asbestos Society.”

“So few newspaper men come this way that that isn’t necessary,” returned Charon. “We have a free press. It is said that ‘the devil frequently becomes a publisher by way of diversion.’ This is the Styx, not the Delaware, and we are going to Hades, not to Philadelphia, thank goodness! The order was framed to muzzle some one more formidable than reporters or devils—woman!”

“Its formation was quite recent. A learned scientist up on the earth, by tapping on the ground to invoke Pluto, discovered extensive deposits of asbestos in Hades. As soon as the news reached the Styx, nothing would satisfy ‘Boss’ Tweed but the formation of a society for the purpose of robbing cremation of its traditional terrors. As to wish is to have, every denizen of the domain of the departed is now wearing an asbestos suit. Dives must have his diversion, even if the devil is cheated out of his own.”

We had crossed over the Styx. Charon quickly made fast to a wharf and prepared to disembark. As I landed I noticed on the dock a legend which read: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”

I WAS in the region of Outer Darkness to which the dead are banished to await the judgment. All about me was a misty blackness so oppressive that one felt as if wedged between mountains. My feet sank in the soft earth, composed of those good intentions with which I had helped to pave the road to Hell. Voices of other days seemed to sound in my ears; out of the shadowy mist forms of ghostly men and women emerged and then were lost to sight, swallowed up in the darkness. Perceiving a glimmering light in the distance I hastened toward it. A phantom house barred my path, but I flitted through it as though it were not. A pale twilight now made objects discernible and I breathed more freely, for I no longer stumbled over the good resolutions, which, being broken, blocked the pavement.

A troop of spectres surrounded me and tried to stop my progress. Shades though they were,[Pg 16] their attentions were annoying and I tried to brush them aside. My hands passed through shadows and the phantoms laughed in derision.

I hadn’t come to Hades to be interviewed, and knowing from the inside some of its perils, I declined to relate what the upper world was doing. This enraged the shades, who gathered about me threateningly. Just then one of my companions on the Styx yachting trip came to my aid. His appearance seemed to inspire the spectres with terror, for they all fled. The newcomer was talkative.

“Did you recognize in the leader of that band our old friend, Diogenes?” he asked.

“No, I never met the gentleman. Up on earth when any one is looking for an honest man, he doesn’t come to a newspaper office: he goes to a detective agency.”

“Diogenes is no longer looking for an honest man. Poor fellow, he knows it’s no use. He thought he had an honest man a few years ago in ‘Boss’ Tweed, but the politician fell from the high pedestal of the ‘man higher up’ when he consented to pose for a caricature of himself by Nast. Our friend of the tub and lantern has begun to wonder if when he finds an honest man it will prove to be a bachelor girl! Not long ago[Pg 17] President Harper sent a professor from the University of Chicago to tell Diogenes that he could have an honest man as soon as he had bled him for another hundred million. So the philosopher is waiting for—”

“Why don’t you express wonder that I knew you were a journalist? Watson always does.”

“There is only one Watson,” I protested. “Besides, it has always seemed to me that he was singularly obtuse. Unless you lent him your spectacles, Watson couldn’t hold down a job in the city room of a New York daily for twenty-four hours. I’m not a journalist, but I acknowledge that ‘newspaper man’ is written all over me, from the pencil in my pocket to my ‘nose for news,’ which is abnormally developed. It’s the easiest thing in the world to tell a newspaper man by his nose, an actor by his clothes and a detective by his cocaine syringe. For instance, you are—”

“The shade of Sherlock Holmes, just returned from a trip to earth. But I really died when I fell over the cliff. That fall made Conan Doyle a Sir. He thought that if he could bring me back to life I would make him an Earl. He tried to breathe in me the breath of life, but while the[Pg 18] dear public wept at my death, they viewed my resurrection with indifference. Ghost stories have been exorcised for all time, so I’m back here for good.”

“Yes, to assist him in ultimately securing the three persons on earth whom he is most eagerly awaiting—David Belasco, John Kendrick Bangs, and Marie Corelli.

“The author of the ‘Darling of the Gods,’ in order to lend realism to the final scene, made a compact with Satan to reproduce Hades on the New York stage; in return he is to give his soul—or his salary—as soon as the play has run its course. That’s the reason Belasco prolonged the run of ‘The Darling of the Gods,’ even after it ceased to pay expenses. A theatrical advance agent, who is to transfer the entire production to Hades, was here several weeks ago and said that the thousandth performance had been reached. Yo San, who is serving her thousand years of penance—a year for each day of the play’s run—says she never would have thought of being wicked if Belasco had not prompted her from the wings. The man who could write ‘To lie a little is better than to be unhappy much’ deserves a place alongside of George Washington.”

“Oh, yes! they’re all here. Washington is[Pg 19] more of a father than ever. He had no family in life, but he has one here larger than he likes—the children of the only woman he never loved. It’s strange how many women go out of their way to remind George how he met defeat at their hands long before he fought the British.”

“Don’t throw that cherry tree at his head when you see him or he’ll think you have an axe to grind. He has never been able to find out who wrote that fable, Æsop being dead and George Ade unborn. When he does, Hades will be too hot to hold both of them, although of course there’s no change of weather to speak of, as the mercury never seeks the bulb. It is always trying to knock the roof off its glass house; that’s the reason there is no throwing of stones in the under world.”

“His Majesty likes to be taken seriously. Most practical jokers, you know, resent a joke at their own expense. While he delights in playing with men, to make fun of him is an offense which Satan cannot condone. Then you know Bangs sent me in ‘Pursuit of the House-boat’ and I frustrated a great many plans of His Majesty.

“Lucifer describes woman—to disabuse your mind of the impression that I have held converse with his Satanic Highness, I will state that I am[Pg 20] quoting Marie Corelli, his press agent—Lucifer describes woman as a frivolous doll of pink and white with long hair frequently not her own. He hates women, for they have made him what he is and keep him so, according to Marie. ‘Women,’ he says, ‘are much less sensitive than men and infinitely more heartless. They are mothers of the human race and the faults of the race are chiefly due to them.’ Considering that the eternal feminine is so fond of him, I am surprised that the Evil One does not reciprocate, but then Lucifer was once an angel and we all know that however angelic she of infinite variety may appear, she is not an angel. I have heard men of moods and appetite talk of women in the same strain as Lucifer and so have ceased to wonder that each woman knows one particular man—usually her husband—whom she describes as a devil.

“Lucifer had found out the truth of the Latin proverb which says ‘Trust not a woman, even when dead,’ and as he didn’t want any divided skirt rule, he had planned to have Capt. Kidd take them to Paris or to Italy, which Robert Burton says is a hell for women. Satan thought he was well rid of them until after the day of judgment, so you can imagine his burning rage when, following Bangs’ orders, I brought them safely back to Hades. When the humorist leaves the earth it will be jumping out of the frying pan of a vivid imagination into a very hot fire of reality.”

“That’s just it. Through all the centuries Lucifer lacked a champion until Marie Corelli sat in judgment on the world and gave it fits after reading ‘Paradise Lost’ and losing her heart as well as her head—as many another girl has done—to the angel who ‘fell, never to rise again.’ Lucifer would have had no attraction for most women if he had not fallen. Milton made him a hero, many persons have embraced him, but no one ever fully understood him except Marie, and great shall be her reward.”

“Oh, we have our society here just as in the upper region, only the world asks who a man is; here the Smart Set asks who he was. Caste is as strong here as in your Four Million and in our upper Ten Thousand.”

“But even yet I do not understand how the champion of His Satanic Majesty is to be rewarded.”

“Lucifer has long wanted a wife. Marie Corelli alone pleases his fancy, besides possessing the necessary qualifications for the position. Here she will be supreme; she will rule even the arch fiend himself. To her kings will bow and princes kneel. Won’t she make it hot for some of the reviewers who ‘roasted’ her on earth! There is only one place where reviews live—in[Pg 22] Hell. There is a torridness of climate here which agrees with them. After all, Hades is no more than a caricature of your world and the doings of men.

“Your society is but vanity; what, then, shall be said of the festivities of Hades? We dine, and our Barmecide feast leaves a nauseating feeling of emptiness. Here amusement is the lash of correction. All is illusion; nothing is real. The fashions of all the centuries flourish here at one time, for every fashion which has had its day straightway goes to Hell. I sometimes think that is the principal reason why women are dissatisfied here; they had to follow the fashion in vogue while they were on the earth and when a late comer appears in a new style hat or dress the other women suffer torments worse than any Satan could devise, especially on Easter Sunday.

“The twilight of Hades forms a sort of X-ray which passes through the clothes and flesh and enables us to see into the heart and mind of one another. The other day Paul Jones met George Washington, walking arm in arm with King George the Fourth. He stopped to say:

“Admiral, I’m glad my children are giving you the honors which are justly yours.” Yet as his mind was as an open book, Jones read his thoughts thus:

“‘Why couldn’t that meddlesome Porter let well enough alone, instead of bringing a mummy[Pg 23] from France to oust me from my place as first in the hearts of my countrymen?’”

Sherlock Holmes puffed reflectively on the shade of a cigar for a few moments; then knocking off an imaginary ash, he continued:

“Whether matches are made in Heaven is a question, but they certainly are not made in Hell, despite the abundance of brimstone and the presence of Lucifer. Courtship is impossible where the heart betrays and fine words are belied by revealed thoughts, where the naked truth cannot be clothed in ‘fig’ language. When all reality has vanished, there can be no delusion, so that men who seldom spoke in the other world save to utter a falsehood have come to speak the truth here. There is only one exception—George Washington.”

“Remember that Hades is the only land which holds the mirror up to nature. In the flash of the earth’s footlights, we act our part in the play of life to dazzle other men and blind them to our faults. Life is a series of poses, each like the film of a moving picture which by the juggling of the operator suggests continuous action, though composed of many lifeless photographs. Our life is an optical illusion. We are judged by what men see us do and yet they perhaps never see us when the mask is off and we have forgotten to pose. We strike our attitude and the world[Pg 24] applauds or jeers. Only when life’s candle is snuffed out do we forget to pose, for then a great awe is upon us. What a haunting thought it is that ‘the evil that men do lives after them’! In life we hugged our sins to ourselves, guarding them zealously; so in death, why cannot they, like the good we do, be decently interred with our bones? When we are laid low, why must our sins go on a rampage of their own, both in the upper and the under worlds? In Hades the mask has been torn away and we see man as he is, not as he would have us see him.”

“Hades is the best place in the universe for the study of history. Socrates is here but his philosophy, as well as his wife, has deserted him; he is now a chronic kicker. Moses strikes his rod on the rocks in vain, for molten lava flows instead of water; the result of his rage is seen at Vesuvius, the devil’s chimney. Pontius Pilate is forever washing his hands, but the red blood flows afresh. Shakespeare tells him that the damned spot will not out. Eve is setting the fashion in fig leaves and serpentine dresses, but like her earthly descendants, is discontented, although she takes a certain spiteful satisfaction in the fact that the number of women in Hades is on the increase. Methuselah is hunting for the fountain of perpetual youth. He wants to be a boy again and his favorite poem is ‘Backward, turn backward, O[Pg 25] Time, in thy flight.’ He suffers a periodic attack of second childishness every thousand years.”

“Do you mean to say that Watson hasn’t told the world about my last and greatest case? Why, that was the very reason I returned to earth! Ambassador Porter came over to England and besought Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to find the dead sea dog. Only one man could do it—myself. Lucifer refused to give me up, but Dr. Doyle matched his cunning with that of His Satanic Majesty, gave him a dose of cocaine, and won. Watson says each case is more difficult than the last, but I do pride myself that this exploit would have baffled every one save the great Sherlock Holmes. By a series of deductions I came to the conclusion that the bones of John Paul Jones would be found wrapped in tinfoil, encased in a leaden coffin, swimming in alcohol under a stable. With this information it was easy for Porter to do the rest. As Watson says: ‘It was all so absurdly simple!’”

“I commissioned Watson to do that, but Conan Doyle, who owns the copyright, may wish[Pg 26] to give the Ambassador the credit until he comes to join us on the banks of the Styx. I never did seek notoriety, but Dr. Doyle, while waiting for patients who never came, reversed the usual practice of physicians; he brought a dead man to life, and of course I was so grateful that I took cocaine to drug my modesty and—the literary market.”

“The latest news we had of you on earth was that you had retired to study bee-farming on Sussex Downs.”

“Bee-farming? That is the most unkind sting of all! Then Sussex must reach down to Hades, for here I am, Oslerized and ostracized. James Payne calls books the chloroform of the mind and so I have been embalmed between covers, and ‘finis’ written for my epitaph. Never mind, it is a matter of indifference to me now that I have had my revenge on that pirate.”

“You forget that I’m English,” he said. “When I pointed out to Porter that the way to fame lay in a dead man’s shoes I paid off a score of more than a century’s standing. Maybe you are not aware that when a body is disturbed after being once buried, its soul must inhabit the Outer Darkness a thousand years longer than the original decree. Let us see how the admiral bears up under the shock. In Wishland that is[Pg 27] an easy matter. Paul Jones, I desire your presence.”

A moment’s pause, then out of the twilight flitted the spectre of a man in naval dress. A husky voice came to us as from the throat of a phonograph:

“A thousand years more! No quarter! No quarter! ‘I had only just begun to fight!’”

“What a merry place is Hades! Imagine a thing and you have it. Think, and at once the thought takes visible form. Truly, this is a land of magic that needs no Aladdin’s lamp. Behold the jugglery of fulfilled desire—that is John Paul Jones!”

THAT Paul Jones was not alone soon became evident. With his coming, other ghostly forms had taken shape in the semi-gloom and the admiral became the centre of a throng which included the greatest men of all time—the only great men, in fact, for one must die before he can be accorded any measure of greatness. Only in the perspective of the past does a man loom large in the vision of the present.

“It were better to be a live politician than a dead hero,” observed Paul Jones, reading my thoughts. Then he sighed.

“But you are honored on earth and even here,” I said, with a glance around the circle at the illustrious members of the Asbestos Society of Sinners.

“Earthly honor is but hysteria,” Jones replied[Pg 32] wearily. “Yet, ‘twas ever thus. One is usually crushed by the honors showered upon him, as were the Romans in attending the banquet of Emperor Elagabalus, who rained roses upon his guests until all were buried and smothered by the flowers. Like them ‘bouquets’ are thrown at me when I am dead, of which I would have been more appreciative while living. Yet ‘bouquets’ are preferable to ‘brickbats,’ even though they do not make so lasting an impression. Hades, as you will soon learn, is more of a news centre than London, and so I have heard that in recent years the city hall of New York was draped in mourning for Hiram Cronk, last survivor of the War of 1812, whose only claim to fame was that he did not die sooner. If earthly honors died on earth I wouldn’t complain, but they are all reproduced in Hades, which is a burlesque of the upper world. Ever since Ambassador Porter found a body which he thought might have looked like me had I looked like that body, I have been given homage by every man in Hades. The joke of the matter—if a Scotchman may take an Irish bull by the horns and joke at his own funeral—is that there is no certainty about the body being mine.”

“When face to face with a dead doubt, don’t look a gift corpse in the mouth,” interrupted the admiral dryly. “Had Porter done so, he would have discovered two gold teeth, and I really must[Pg 33] insist that if that body is mine, those teeth were filled after I died. In the old days, before the doctors invented appendicitis, I did not mind swallowing all the grape sent with the enemy’s compliments, but I always did draw the line at the dentist’s chair, and any manipulator of the forceps would have struck a snag had he investigated my corpse too closely. Perhaps I ought not to complain, for it may be that if I keep my mouth shut I shall get a decent funeral, and unfortunately this is supposed to be my funeral.”

“My dear fellow, it is easy to pile up proofs on a dead man, for he cannot rise up to refute them. Here is a dead body; Paul Jones is dead: therefore, this must be Paul Jones. That may be logic but it is not common-sense. Yet this text-book reasoning is no more absurd than the ‘proofs.’ First of all, there was the absence of a coffin plate; had the body been missing instead of the name it would have been more worthy of notice. An autopsy has revealed traces of the disease of which I died, and this after a hundred years! If they were as expert in diagnosing the living as they are in cutting up the dead, fewer of the mistakes of the doctors would have to be buried from sight and mind. Then these learned savants triumphantly point to the height as a sure proof that this is the body of Jones and not of Smith, though both families are so numerous[Pg 34] that the bones of one more or less doesn’t matter save as a museum exhibit—from which fate may the Stars and Stripes protect me! It seems from this deduction that I was the only person ever born into the world who ever attained to a stature of five feet and seven inches. That’s what a man gets for measuring up to the standard! The most remarkable coincidence of all is that neither uniform nor sword was found. Evidently Paris makes it a custom to bury its dead, civilian and officer alike, in a shroud of mystery, epaulets and gold stripes.

“Really, the only proof distilled is that the body was found floating in alcohol. I was so fond of that preservative in life, according to the historical novelists, that if a dead body can move of its own volition, I know mine would have sought out the alcohol. It may be the body of John Jones or John Smith, or it may be the remains of some Johnny Craupaud of a century ago; who knows? A slip of genealogy has lost thrones and made more than one man get off the earth.”

“At least you must concede it is not often that many cities squabble over the honor of giving sepulture to a man’s remains.”

“After a century of neglect,” retorted Jones, “‘history repeats itself,’ as my friend Tom Heyward will tell you.”

“It’s a wonder some of those cities did not foresee the coming events of which Homer was the shadow and make a play for Jones. Now, Seward, it’s your turn. Come, Tom, speak your little piece.”

Paul Jones was about to speak when he was interrupted by a newcomer who chanted:

“That is Mr. Anon,” whispered Lord Bacon. “Shakespeare is quite jealous of him, for Anon claims to be the most voluminous author in the world and, like Byron’s reviewer, has ‘just enough learning to misquote.’ He seldom quotes anyone correctly, not even excepting himself, but in this he is not unlike those other authors whom excess of egotism persuades into signing their names to that which would be their own had not some one said it before.”

“I ought to give you a pension for making my sayings so well known; I notice you never quote your own sentiments because mine answer all purposes so much better.”

“I was talking of you, I grant that,” retorted Shakespeare. “Shall I repeat it? My wife says that it’s only by a hair—”

“You two men are always quarreling,” interrupted Anon. “Please keep the age of Anne from his lordship’s notice, for she hath a way to fry his Bacon. My lord, you should never judge a poet by his hair.”

“Nor yet by his feet,” interrupted Longfellow; “although if a poet looks well to his feet there are no heights to which he cannot climb.”

“I accept the measure of your judgment,” went on Anon calmly. “As for the lady, Delilah’s barber stunt convinced Samson it isn’t wise to tell the truth to a woman.”

“Yet I must insist,” continued Lord Bacon, “that Shakespeare is rather shy of hair to be a real poet. Of course, I have heard the story that Anne Hathaway, after a conference with Delilah, sought to reduce the strength of the Samson of letters by cutting his name from Shakespeare to Shakspeare and trimming his hair to make assurance doubly sure, but Lot’s wife, in looking backward, has recommended that the pig-tale be swallowed with a grain of salt. My dear Willie, your[Pg 37] poetry has pains in its feet, your rhyme has received the absent treatment, and your rythm, like your hair, is lacking.”

“Oh, well, hair doesn’t grow on brains,” retorted the claimant to “Hamlet.”

“A hirsute chrysanthemum growing on a man’s head is more likely to indicate a quarterback Freshman on the gridiron than a hunchback poet on the Mount of Parnassus. As for the poet’s other extreme, metrical feet are not always symmetrical.”

“You mean damn!” interjected Lord Bacon, profanely. “Let me lend you the metres, Bill, so that you may measure up to my standard, or else cork the rythmic bottle and spill no more mimic blood of red ink.”

“The gas man is the only person who controls my metre,” said the Bard of Avon, chuckling at his own wit. “You quite sweep me off my metaphorical feet. That may not be original, but I have no aspirations in the direction of originality.”

“The last broker who arrived from Wall Street[Pg 38] says that you are too full of quotations to be original,” sneered Lord Bacon.

“Have you forgotten that you once said ‘a man that hath no virtue in himself ever envieth virtue in others?’ Bartlett allows you seven pages, while he gives me more than a hundred. Familiarity breeds imitators. Even in quotations, you follow after me.”

“If you wear so long a face, you’ll stub your toe on your chin,” observed Anon, noting that Lord Bacon was getting the worst of his controversy with Shakespeare. “Never mind Bill’s raving. Burton tells him he larded his lean books with the fat of others’ works. Maybe that’s the reason why he gives his readers mental dyspepsia; to inwardly digest ‘Hamlet’ would disagree with the stomach of an ostrich. After all, the world knows that Shakespeare was not a man but a syndicate, to which I was the largest contributor. I’ll call the man a plagiarist who says I’m a liar.”

No one cared to knock off the verbal chip which Anon had put upon his shoulders, so Paul Jones resumed:

“Of course,” I answered; “you, as an American, couldn’t stand being beaten by a foreigner like Homer, even though you are both dead ones. You are claimed by New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Arlington, Richmond, Fredericksburg, Annapolis, and Ocean Grove. I believe[Pg 39] there are a few other cities whose names have escaped my memory. Have you any preference in the matter?”

“It’s odd no one has thought about consulting me before. I could have settled the controversy at once. France did not treat me or my bones very well, yet I can’t say I am glad to leave there. It isn’t very pleasant to be dead, but it’s worse to have people squabble over your body. I wonder if Porter ever heard the adage ‘Let the dead rest in peace,’ and that other one ‘Cursed be he who moves my bones!’ You’ve seen two dogs fight over a bone, but you never saw the bone fight. I am nothing but bones.”

“I hope they won’t bury me in New York. I’ve heard it said that the metropolis is noisy enough to wake the dead and it is certain that my presence would make Captain Landais turn over in his grave. I always did bore Landais and so if I invaded the territory of the tired, St. Patrick’s cemetery would yawn and give up its dead.”

“Had you been a politician,” observed Matt Quay, “some faction of our party would long since have unearthed one of your letters in which you had selected your burial place.”

“You have not yet told me your choice,” I reiterated, remembering the city editor’s parting words.

“I would rather be embalmed in the throbbing[Pg 40] heart of the sea, with which my own heart beat so long in unison. My grave has been unmarked for a century, so why not forever? I would prefer to be commander of that greatest army of all, the unknown dead, whose resting place is marked only by monuments of billows and flowers of feathery spray. A bridal veil of silver surge is as elaborate a shroud as I desire.”

“We’ll get enough of that down here some day, so it is useless to undergo the ‘roasting’ process twice. Yet it has its advantages. Soldiers and sailors don’t get much time for godliness, you know, and as cleanliness is next to it, cremation might—”

That was as far as Mr. Anon could proceed, for he had fired John Brown’s anger. That worthy said he was hanged if he were going to allow anybody to “roast” him by any such incendiary remark.

“Choke him off,” came the chorus from all sides. “Here’s a rope. String him up.”

This brought up such unpleasant recollections of the past that John Brown subsided. I hastened to pacify him by observing:

“You have no cause for disquiet, for your bones lie peacefully in the Adirondacks at North Elba.”

“Peace at Elba? If you found peace there, you accomplished more than did the great Napoleon, and that were impossible.”

“Ah, but you see I hadn’t met my Waterloo,” I retorted. Wellington laughed tauntingly.

“Neither had I when I went to Elba,” supplemented Bonaparte, and then and there I met my Waterloo at the hands of Napoleon. It is poor policy for a writer of history to dispute the maker of it, though I am aware the historical novelists hold other views. For a moment it seemed as if Wellington’s tantalizing mirth would precipitate another battle between the illustrious warriors. Then the two men shook hands, looking like two prize fighters about to enter the ring. Nothing happened, however, and with a trace of disappointment in his tone,—for immortals are very like mortals and he dearly loved a fight,—Paul Jones went on:

“It is a good thing I’m dead, for living heroes always get restless and tumble from the clay pedestal on which an admiring public places them. Heroes should be handled with care, for they are perishable goods. Both Dewey and Dowie have had their day. Dewey turned his house over to his wife so the sheriff couldn’t get it, as many another man has done before and since. Evidently the dear public didn’t believe the two[Pg 42] were one, for the hero-worshippers swept him to obscurity on a tidal wave of regretful tears. I wonder if he said it was all Mrs. Dewey’s fault. You know it is more difficult to manage a wife in America nowadays than it was in the days of Solomon, when the wives were so frequent that a man couldn’t remember which one was to blame.”

“I feel quite honored at so illustrious an accession to our ranks,” said Captain Kidd.

“Stop your Kidding,” he said to the pirate. “I believe my conduct was unsatisfactory to them on several occasions when I bearded the lion in his channel. The English are queer. They made Captain Pierson a baronet for getting defeated.”

“If we had had Paul Jones,” said Lord Nelson, “we would have made him prime minister and buried him in Westminster Abbey. England is the most grateful of all nations.”

“You need not remind me of the ungratefulness of republics,” rejoined Jones. “I have experienced it, though I am not a living example. But, my lord, I wish I had had you pitted against me in the days of ’77; I would dearly have loved to have exchanged shots with you.”

“You are too kind,” drawled Nelson, lifting[Pg 43] his monocle to his blind eye. “I really can’t see you in that light.”

“You have an eye single to your own interest,” I said to Nelson; then turning to Jones:

“We will leave it to Roosevelt,” replied the admiral. “Whether it is John Brown, John Jones or Johnny Craupaud, he will see that the body gets a square deal—box!”

“How about your epitaph? I would suggest: First in war, last in peace, and at present in the hearts of his countrymen, to mark the tomb of the father of the American navy. That epitomizes your whole career.”

“I do not want to usurp Washington’s paternal honors. Of course all epitaphs are written by Mephisto, ‘the father of liars,’ as you know, but if mine were to be truthful, my tomb would bear the simple inscription:

“QUAKER worship may be as appropriate as any other kind on Sunday,” observed William Penn, “but this silence is getting on my nerves. Why don’t you say something funny, you humorists? What’s the use of having famous funny men in this society if they cannot enliven Hades on a dull Sabbath?”

“I’m not in the humor to be humorous to-night,” said Bret Harte, who was busily engaged in making “Condensed Novels” by tearing to shreds without reading, their contents from the title page to the finis; book reviewing they designate it up on earth.

“If you can define the difference between wit and humor, I’ll promise to laugh the next time you see things at night,” retorted Harte.

“Eternity is too short for definitions, except to a philologist,” evaded Field. “Ask Dick[Pg 48] Whately; the archbishop of Dublin is the only man who discriminates English synonyms.”

“I know when you don’t ask me,” replied the doctor. “Consult Webster.”

“Mark that down, Boswell, even if Shakespeare does object to the doctor’s company on the Mount of Parnassus. A man of perpetual inspiration ought to use a fountain pen, but in the absence of a point to Johnson’s wit, Demosthenes will lend you a pebble.”

“As I live in a glass hot-house, I never throw stones,” gurgled the orator, after a vain effort to clear his throat of a pill from the laboratory of Nature.

“On earth I always kept a box of bon mots on my chimney piece,” put in Sydney Smith.

“If they had been chocolate bon bons, you would have been a sustaining favorite among the ladies,” chuckled King Henry the Eighth.

“Where knowledge of women is concerned, I bow to your marital Majesty,” acquiesced Smith. “Mere man never becomes a post-graduate on femininology, but he can manage to get up a bowing acquaintance with women after he is married to six of them. It seems to me that Utah would be a good place to study her ‘of infinite variety.’ I have often thought that much of[Pg 49] Solomon’s wisdom came from his three hundred wives.”

“With such a match-making father,” I put in, my newspaper instinct scenting “copy,” “I have often wondered why good Queen Bess never married.”

“I’m sorry Elizabeth didn’t keep up the family reputation,” answered the king, “but I guess she thought I did marrying enough for the whole family. Besides, Bess had her hands full ruling the kingdom and her temper without attempting to rule a husband. However, I never could understand why she turned a deaf ear to Sir Walter’s pleading. He wooed her so long with his eyes that she asked him one day why he was such a mute, inglorious Raleigh. He replied that a beggar who is dumb should challenge double pity. As many another man has done since then, the silent lover lost his head over a woman.”

“That’s the King James version,” retorted Sir Walter. “It seems to me that your Majesty should confine yourself to rattling the skeletons in your own Bluebeard’s closet.”

“I see you have a sharp tongue to match the edge of the axe which brought you to your knees. You had a reason for what you did on earth, but you lost your reason along with your head when you left the upper world. By the shade of Anne Boleyn,” went on the king, becoming more and more enraged as he proceeded, “were we on earth,[Pg 50] your insolence should cause you to swing from Tyburn’s tree.”

“You can’t string me up,” sneered Raleigh. “No man ever made a monkey of me.”

“No, but a woman did. You can’t cloak what you did for Elizabeth. Now Anne—”

“You forget yourself,” angrily interrupted Anne Boleyn, who had just come upon the scene.

“It’s time you came home, Henry. You’ve been keeping altogether too late hours at the club recently and I’ve come to take you home.”

“But I had promised to take tea with Catharine Parr,” rebelled Henry. “You know she is rightfully my wife.”

“Really? You forget that decrees of divorce are not binding in Hades, whether they have been executed by the hangsman or by the justice.”

“This is altogether without precedent, but I must support the lady,” responded the jurist, gallantly.

“Then take her. Bless you, my children. I’ve no hard feelings, Anne. May no decrees of court or fate terminate your second union. I’ve sampled the wine of her womanhood, Judge, and as wine improves with age, it ought to be even better now than it was some hundreds of years ago.”

“It isn’t every man who would give his wife a recommendation,” diplomatically remarked Blackstone, alarmed at the construction Henry had placed on his gallantry, and noting that Anne Boleyn seemed pleased thereby. “I fear, however, that Satan would object to any but Lucifer matches in Hades, so until you strike brimstone, Anne here is still your wife.”

“You must settle that with them,” evaded the jurist. “I think one wife would be enough for me, but as you have made your harem, you can’t lie out of it.”

“Henry!” The tone was threatening. The king meekly arose and cast an appealing glance at me.

“I would be delighted to have your company,” he said. “In the olden days I should have commanded, but Anne has taken the command from me. You know I want you to denounce those hysterical novelists who have taken liberties with my wives.”

“I’d like to see them take liberties with me,” aggressively brindled madam.

“They couldn’t do that,” soothingly replied his Majesty. “No, they painted you in your true colors: a study in black and white.”

“On Eighth Avenue, of course,” returned the king, as if that were a foregone conclusion.[Pg 52] “Lucifer named and numbered the streets after a recent visit to New York. Ward McAllister wanted me to live in apartments at Twenty-third Street and Fifth Avenue, but the ‘skidoo set’ was not exclusive enough for me and I said I would live on Eighth Avenue or go back to England. Charon wouldn’t listen to that, as he said I had given him only a single trip ticket. So I am domiciled on Eighth Avenue, which we have now reached. Here I live with my six wives.”

“Six?” I exclaimed, as we entered the royal palace. “I thought it was eight wives. Why did they call you Henry the Eighth if it were not because of the number of your consorts? The only thing we Americans know about you is that you had more wives than the law allows, and instituted a church to enable you to get another.”

“America?” muttered the king. “I don’t remember where that is. Down here, however, we refer all questions of geography to Atlas. My dear, won’t you ask him to come here if he isn’t too weary from carrying on his shoulder the chip of a world which no one will knock off.”

“Your church was instituted too late to be binding on me,” she said, her nose becoming an acute retrousse. “The word obey didn’t cut any figure in our matrimonial contract.”

“If I once chopped off your head, as the historians say, you’ve snapped mine off since,” grumbled his hen-pecked Majesty.

“My head was divorced from my shoulders. I should have preferred the courts of law to courting the axe.”

“There! don’t cry or you will cause the carpet to mildew. My dear, never try to salt down a man’s affections with briny tears.”

A queenly woman entered the room. I arose to greet her. The king’s fat interfered with his gallantry; besides, the woman was his wife, which explains while it does not justify.

“My sister and my wife,” said Henry, presenting me to Catharine of Arragon. “It’s the only case on record where a woman, after promising to be a man’s sister, became his wife. Do you wonder that I began to feel quite rich in family relations? Although I murdered my sister-in-law, I left it to the punsters to murder the mothers-in-law who came after me.”

“The historians say that my fall from kingly favor was a matter of conscience,” mused Her Grace. “Didn’t the still small voice make itself heard when you severed the bonds of matrimony with your little hatchet?”

“Not at all, Catharine. I left my conscience on the executioner’s block to flirt with yours!”

“Of course. Matrimony always had much attraction for me, although I realize that a man had better fall into the sea than fall in love and marry. A corpse devoured by crabs is no less[Pg 54] harrowing than the spectacle of a man devoured by love, and it is better to multiply crabs than to multiply sinners and fools. Matrimony is a foretaste of purgatory to which no man should be called upon to submit before death.”

“There you are again, Anne, throwing ancient history in my teeth. Did you ever hear how I got rid of the gout?”

“Ah, thank goodness, one incident of my life has escaped the novelists. Lucifer is compiling a mammoth work ‘Every Man His Own Historian’ to which we are all contributing. It promises to to be one of the ‘six best sellers.’ Permit me to read a chapter from my autobiography:

“I must have fallen asleep upon my throne. I dreamed that a great iron safe had fallen upon my feet and awoke to find a hideous-looking creature seated complacently upon my bandaged foot. I groaned and tried to shake him off, but he still clung there and the weight of his body seemed to be pushing red-hot needles into the swollen flesh.

“‘What! you are Mr. Gout, who is responsible for my sufferings and you actually have the impudence to come here! Why, oh my foot!’

“‘From pure cussedness, confound you! Ow-oh, I wish you would keep your attentions to yourself.’

“‘That’s the way of the world. A man is indiscreet, and when he has to pay the penalty, lays the blame on some one else. My duty is to remind you that you cannot abuse this body with impunity.’

“The hideous creature began to jump up and down on my foot. Maddened by the pain, I picked up a heavy dictionary lying near and hurled seventy thousand words bound in calf at him. The aim was too low and Webster fell over my foot. Then I fainted. The Gout had gone!”

“Now that you have disposed of Dr. Gout, let us go back to our original subject—women,” I said, smiling. “A man who has had six wives ought to have some knowledge of the feminine character.”

“Just in time, fool,” he said. “Answer our American friend: What is a woman?”

“‘A rag and a bone and a hank of hair.’ That sounds like a before-treatment advertisement, but is really original with Kipling. As for myself, although a fool, I don’t attempt to designate a woman by a descriptive tag, as if she were a special brand of chocolates. To man, woman is a[Pg 56] sphinx endowed with a voice. He never gets more than a telephonic acquaintance with her, and the woman always hangs up the receiver and monopolizes the transmitter.”

“Listen to the words of a wise fool who wears a dunce cap for a crown,” approved Henry. “Right you are, Heyward, and one woman is very much like another.”

“I beg to differ,” said the poet. “Women are different, not only in their baptismal labels, but in that some women have a husband and others have a cat. Women have often been compared to cats, but did you ever contrast cats and men? Thomas never throws his mother in the face of his wife. He keeps his own whiskers trimmed and stays home nights. He does not come back to the partner of his bosom at three A. M. with a diagonal gait and an asinine gayety, chewing the butt of a cigar and talking in a tongue that is as unsteady as his legs. Nor does Tommy slam the door in fourteen languages when Kitty asks how that blonde hair came on his coat. But we’re all human. If you’re hunting for a perfect woman, stop—she’s dead; if for a perfect man, you’re a fool. Elijahs are no longer translated without being prepared for the undertaker. Yet methinks that if one could forget other folks’ mistakes as easily as one’s own, there would be less scandal.”

“One thing has always puzzled me. Why is it that women prefer to be old men’s darlings, that you enjoy being clouds in the sunset’s glow rather than in the noontide glory?”

“The setting sun always gives a golden lining to the clouds it embraces, but to drop the figurative—we are soaring rather high—and come down to earth, women marry old men so that they may soon become widows.”

Henry nervously tried to adjust an imaginary crown that weighed heavily on his head.

“Seymour plucked the weeds from the garden of your widowed life before the first blade of grass had pushed up from a newly-made grave. O Inconstancy! O Woman! Of two things, one. Orpheus went to Hell to find his wife. He failed to win her from her refuge in the shades because he looked back to discern her features. Had Euridice retraced the path from Hell without bringing with her surcease from domestic woe, Orpheus would have wished her back down that familiar track. I wish he would pay us another visit. I’d loan him five of mine.”

“Catharine is always at Parr,” continued the king. His fondness for punning nearly proved his undoing.

“I’m not below Parr,” angrily exclaimed Catharine of Arragon. “I come before her.”

“No, you came,” corrected the king. “It’s merely a question of tense. Many a woman promises to be a sister to the devil who has never received a proposal.”

“That’s a good one on you!” laughed the fool. “Her Grace of Arragon promised to be a sister to you! What do you say to that?”

“My answer is written in history. ‘The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away,’ for which ‘blessed be the name of the Lord.’ I replaced my wives, so that the supply would always equal the demand. I believed that as long as the Lord took, it was my duty to take.”

The king paused long enough to drink a cup of pink tea and to eat some breaded calves’ brains for inspiration.

“When trouble comes,” continued Henry, “some people fly to matrimony, thinking drink too vulgar.”

“They were, but my troubles always came singly,” chuckled the king. “As fast as I executed one, another came, but I made sure I was off with the old head before I coveted the new.”

“The only bright thing an American can remember to have heard Punch say is ‘don’t’ when matrimony is on the horizon, but then Punch is[Pg 59] English and England has no Ali Ben Theodore—peace to his Strenuosity—to turn the throne into a pulpit for dissertations on vital statistics in the hope that he may make census taking an unnecessary burden of government. Modern philologists were seriously considering the advisability of eliminating the word ‘papa’ from the dictionary, when the leading exponent of the life effective raised the question as to why mamma’s lap wasn’t filled. When the president becomes advance agent for the stork hope is born, but if the stork continues to be derelict in its duties, we might give the eagle a trial in an endeavor to have this statistical indictment set aside.”

“What does Mr. Roosevelt know about the rights of unattached bachelors?” asked Catharine the Third. “He isn’t a bachelor and never was one; he was born domestic and to the domestic man nothing ever happens—except the buying of more cradles.”

“A woman’s tongue is as full of sharp points as a porcupine,” observed Henry, who was inordinately fond of epigrammes. “But never mind, Kittens, I am the last man in the world who would deprive you of woman’s inalienable rights—love, license, and the pursuit of man.”

“Their Majesties are looking well and youthful,” I said, with a gesture that included all the wives of the much-married king.

“One never grows any older in Hades,” answered[Pg 60] Henry. “That explains its attraction for women, and why the devil has so many votaries among the fair sex!”

“An exclamation point often hides a pointless period. When a man talks epigrammatically about woman, it is a sign that he doesn’t understand her.”

“The most miserable man in Hades is no longer Job but Methuselah,” whispered Anon. “Ever since Dr. Osler celebrated his departure for England by proposing a wholesale slaughter of the innocent aged, Methuselah has had to take a seat on the sinners’ bench. It was formerly considered an honor to be an old man, even in Hades, but now it is a disgrace not to have died young. The other day, Cain, who is the bad boy of the underworld, gave Methuselah as a birthday present a collection of thirty-six bottles of chloroform, one for each sixty years of his earthly age. Then the lad, who is Satan’s chief imp, put a placard on Methuselah’s back reading ‘Oslerized.’”

“There comes a time in every man’s life when he wishes for Herod’s power, that he might order[Pg 64] all children killed—except his own!” muttered the old man. “But I had my revenge: I was Abel to raise Cain over a foot.”

“That is a prehistoric relic which leaked from the Ark when we grounded on Mt. Ararat,” volunteered Noah. “I sprung that ‘raising Cain’ joke on Mrs. Noah, but you know a woman has no sense of humor and she said she had her hands full without working the adoption degree.”

“A. Hasbeen, M.D., late secretary of the Os-slurs Chloroforming Institute of Baltimore. To-day I became a back number—60—which entitled me to a painless passing, the anæsthetic being administered by Dr. Senile. But there was no need of the old men getting angry at what Dr. Osler said about them. He intended it only for advertising purposes. Having got himself talked into notoriety, his publishers have announced that a book by the doctor is in press.”

“Then am I revenged indeed! Æsthetic as he is, Dr. Osler will wish that he had taken an anæsthetic before the book reviewers get through with him. Oh, for the fatally facile pen of the bright and bitter Corelli!”

“Oh, the idea is itself old enough to be chloroformed,” explained Dr. Hasbeen. “Osler has been trying to explain that it was all a jest, but the public refuses to take him in earnest: a comedian never can become a tragedian. It only goes to show that, although Barnum may be right in his opinion that the American people like to be fooled, they won’t swallow a joke that is thrust down their throats and smile over it, and they do not want their sense of the ludicrous drugged by an overdose of chloroform.”

“I may be a member of the silent majority,” went on Methuselah, “but this insult to age would put speech in the most chapfallen mummy, however it might be pressed for time. Notified to quit thinking at forty and to stop living at sixty! Why, in my day, a man hadn’t cut his wisdom tooth then! I’m inclined to think that Dr. Osler still has some teeth to cut. Man, like wine, improves with age. Before making that speech the doctor should have put on his old slippers; then nobody would have known where the shoe pinched him.”

“I wonder how long it took Osler to sober up[Pg 66] after that intemperate speech? Nobody ever heard of him until he approached the danger line of encroaching years. What has he been doing in the past? Doubtless he is no different from the ordinary man, who remains a dormant factor until he comes to years of discretion, which is more likely to be sixty than sixteen. Before that time, he courts women and wine more assiduously than wisdom and common sense.”

“A man’s early life is too much taken up with breach-of-promise cases, divorces and the stock exchange to care whether or not the world owes him a living or to take the trouble to collect it. Though the financial acumen of Humpty Dumpty does not make Wall Street tremble, it tumbles to a good thing long before he takes a fall to himself. The bears come out of their pits and the bulls leave their greenbacks to seek other and greener goods to devour.”

“‘Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools’; they’ve been there themselves,” retorted Methuselah.

“It is easy to mould even stubborn facts by applying the sparks from the thought anvils of dead men’s minds, which the world accepts because the men are dead and not because the sparks burn with living truth.

“Thank you, Young,” said Methuselah, gratefully. “Your ‘Night Thoughts’ have shed light on a dark subject. Young is older in wisdom than his name implies, for a man does not get his mental equilibrium until the pendulum is swinging to the west, and he becomes too old to wallow in champagne or to eat lobster suppers with a peroxide blonde. A man’s legs may be in a forced retreat to the grave, but his brain remains more active in the world’s service than that of the youngster under forty, who develops the muscle in his arms at the expense of the gray matter in his brain. It is only the callow youth who suffers from softening of the brain. The man at sixty has more dollars in his cellar and more sense in his garret than the fool of thirty has cents in his pocket. Yet youth and age are not antagonistic; they are like the two parts of a pair of scissors in the work of the world: ‘useless each without the other.’”

“Don’t you think that Dr. Osler promulgated his theory of earthly eradication at the suggestion of a feminine relative?”

“That would not be surprising. Women are apt to see the defects of an aged man of talent and the merits of a young fool. It is possible that some woman in the Osler family is weary of being an old man’s darling and wants to squeeze him out, unless he can produce the elixir of Faust.”

“That’s the solution. The women are determined to have something to squeeze, even if they have to stifle their embraces in chloroform and let their affections go to ‘weeds.’ Woman is a poppy that exhales her perfume only in the shade. It may be that somebody else has said that after me, for Osler implies that the oldest inhabitant is only a reminiscence of what isn’t so. Who was the author, Bartlett?”

“That is not a ‘Familiar Quotation,’” answered Bartlett, after a hurried consultation with Dr. Johnson and Roget. “Therefore, it must belong to Anon; he claims everything to which other people cannot prove their title. It seems to me that you are getting so independent that you even rebel against your metaphors. You call woman a fragrant poppy in the shade, in apparent ignorance of the fact that in Hades, where all women have shady characters, there is no perfume. You poets can scent everything but the bloom of truth.”

“Oh, well, you’re not so fragrant,” said Anon, slangily. “You only gathered a posie of other men’s flowers, while I furnished the thread which bound them. But we have lost the thread of this discourse. It seems to me that if the lethal chamber were to become popular, a man would have to begin putting his affairs in order almost as soon as he had ceased to ask his mother-in-law if he might kiss his wife.”

“That’s one thing which has struck me as odd,” I said. “What particular place of torment has been reserved for the mothers-in-law? I haven’t seen one since I came to Hades.”

“Nor are you likely to do so,” chuckled Anon. “Mothers-in-law go to Paradise without any preliminary probation. Adam had no mother-in-law, you know, so he insisted that he wasn’t going to put up with any one’s else. Lucifer was glad to accede to Adam’s request for banishing these marital appendages, for he feared that if he allowed the mothers-in-law to enter Hades, he would be out of a job within twenty-four hours. No man ever doubted that his wife’s mother could outpoint the devil.”

I glanced in alarm at Dr. Roget, who appeared to be choking, but soon I discovered that he was merely swallowing half a dozen pages of his “Thesaurus” preparatory to communicating his ideas to us. He spoke slowly, biting off a word, chewing it until it was thoroughly digested, and then spitting it forth with the retort of a verbal bomb. His speech lasted as long as the paper held out, which he later explained by saying that he never could speak without notes.

“If the world knew that the mother-in-law is a rarer bird in Hades than a political blackbird hanging over both sides of the fence under the plum tree, the earth would be depopulated faster by that news than by the Oslerized process.[Pg 70] Charon would have to charter all the world’s warships for transports and each man in Hades would have to make a jack o’ lantern of his skull to prevent being run down by the crowd of onrushing shades. Hades would no longer be a country of suburban cottages but a Hell of Harlem flats.”

“We are wandering farther away from the subject under discussion than any convention of preachers I ever knew,” said David. “Isn’t it about time we had a text? I would suggest: ‘And Saul took the sword and fell upon it.’”

“You see I didn’t have Dr. Osler for a medical adviser,” explained Saul. “In my day, when we wanted to shorten the duration of our stay on that planet called the earth, we cut it. Methinks an opiate would have deadened the edge of the sword when I walked the plank.”

“Dr. Osler has gone me one better,” said David. “He has revised the Psalms to read: The days of a man are two score years, and if, by reason of any extraordinary fund of vitality, he shall linger around until he is three score without the ten, he had better get a hustle on and remove himself, for he is in the way of some one else.”

“Like an emetic, one thing brings up another,” put in Methuselah, anxious to throw up his grievance. “Having told us it is one’s duty to dismiss himself from the world, this authority very kindly suggested that a particular anæsthetic would be[Pg 71] the best means for one’s transfer out of time. The edict has gone forth: All out at sixty. When the census-taker makes his rounds, he will say: ‘Age, if you please? Sixty? Kindly step into the asphyxiation chamber or into the ambulance where you will find a bottle awaiting you. Good-night’. Night, when deep sleep falleth upon man, has come too early. When a babe, he smelleth the bottle afar off and lo! children cry for the soothing syrup which the man would fain put away. Before his eye is dimmed by the sunset glow, the light of his life is quenched in four ounces of chloroform.

“According to this medical expert,” continued Methuselah, “when a man proposes to celebrate his sixtieth birthday by emigrating beyond the Styx, he is to buy a ticket and pay for it with poison or pistol. He is then fit only for the doctor and the refuse heap. Has it come to this? No twentieth century painless surgery for me, thank you. Long life is no longer a thing to long for. I would prefer to be kissed not by the dews of night but by the salutation of the glorious morning.”

“‘Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth,’” exclaimed Solomon, who still the wisest of men, had hitherto kept silent. He was addressing Methuselah. “One may no longer tarry until his beard is grown and his hair is dyed. No longer may he come to his grave in a full age like as a shock[Pg 72] of corn cometh in his season, and though it may go against the grain, the Grim Reaper stalks through the field, stopping up the ears with Osler’s Death Drugs.”

“The doctor is an homeopathist,” observed Sherlock Holmes, in a tone so decided that it left no question for argument.

“I’m not Watson,” I responded, “but of course I know you want some one to ask you how you know. Just to be accommodating, allow me to inquire how you can tell that Dr. Osler is an homeopathist when you haven’t even the ashes of his cigar to analyze? Do you mean because of small doses?”

“No; like cures like. Old men being a drug on the market, it takes a drug to remove them. Had he consulted me I would have recommended cocaine instead of chloroform.”

“Do you think that Dr. Osler will take his own medicine when the frost is on the temples and the anæsthetic’s handy?”

“Doctors never do. That may be because of professional etiquette, but it is more likely that the physicians recognize the truth of the saying about self-preservation being the first law of nature. Some doctors are so conscientious that they would rather be murdered by another physician than commit suicide themselves. You may depend upon it that there is no chloroform in Dr. Osler’s family medicine chest; he keeps it only for his patients!”

IT was with no little trepidation that I mounted the steps of the summer palace of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, and knocked timidly at the door. Had I not been somewhat dazed by the nature of my mission, I might have noticed an electric bell somewhere around, but who ever heard of a bell on a palace door? That would be in violation of all ethics of the made-to-order novel. I had determined to see nothing but what I wished to see and to brush the dust from my knowledge of royalty—gleaned from the historical novels which tell of everything under the sun except history—so I bridled my patience and gave my imagination a free rein. That’s a hobby of mine.

As I closed my eyes and waited with an[Pg 76] unuttered prayer that there might be no dungeon beneath this castle wall, I felt a queer sensation in my left side. Twice before I had undergone a similar experience. Once I had called an imperious maiden “my queen” and the lover who is in the background of every girl butted into the foreground and knocked me out of the centre of the stage. The other occasion is too painful to recall and not at all humorous, so I will lose the thread of memory and resume the thread of my discourse.

I believe I left myself on the palace portico, with my hands clasped over the hollow place caused by a missing rib, which is the only legacy left by an ancestor who was too fond of stolen pippins. Since then I have become convinced that the ache was owing to an uneasy conscience; but then I thought it was only my heart. Outside the palace I had one kind of heart disease; would I contract the other kind within the walls I had forgotten that it takes two to make a contract and had reckoned without my queen and with an utter disregard of the rules of mathematics. But there are exceptions to rules; why not to rulers?

I continued to stand outside the palace. Perhaps you wonder at that, but the reason is simple: the door was closed and, moreover, it was locked. I am no Sherlock Holmes, nor do I smoke, so I couldn’t deduce from the ashes of a cigar how I[Pg 77] could get that door between me and the street. There was nothing to do but wait.

And wait I did. Somehow, I didn’t mind it, for you see I was waiting on a queen. I had waited on other girls with more impatience and more candied sweetness. Every woman’s idea of a sensible man is one who will make a fool of himself over her and if it pleases her, he doesn’t object to playing court jester. That’s what we men are here for—to prevent women from being bored by the society of their own sex.

Finally I was admitted. Just how I seem to have forgotten. Let me recall my lessons in memory-training-by-the-aid-of association:

Rule one is to begin at the beginning. Eve began it; she added Adam; united they stood: over an apple paring they fell; that’s it—I took a tumble to myself, which is neither slang nor a figure of speech. I had been leaning against the door, and as my spirits grew more heavy, it was more than the door hinged on. We parted company and as I lay upon the floor I felt quite prostrated over it. I lost my dignity and my watch; then I lost my time but not my temper, although I had fallen into a compost of lime and sand left as a trap by one of the palace workmen.

“Are you hurt?” inquired a man-of-arms, as I picked myself out of the mortar.

“Oh, no,” I answered, the ready tears starting sympathetically. “I’m not hurt but I feel rather mortified!”

When I told the man in waiting that I had come to see the queen, he looked doubtful and made a half audible remark about somebody rushing in and about downtrodden angels. It was an unfamiliar quotation and as I had no copy of Bartlett’s handy, I did not take his “posie of other men’s flowers” to myself. Had there been any stairs on which to fight I might have emulated the “gentleman of France,” but I come from another country where elevators have killed romance as well as other things.

Another wait. I still smarted from contact with the lime, and feeling a humiliating sense of my own unworthiness, I meekly made myself small. When She entered I began to shrivel until I felt like unleaded agate after being thrown into the “hell box.”

Good Queen Bess is every inch a queen, even to her feet. “Sweet and twenty” she was—at one time; I can vouch for the qualifying adjective, if not for the noun, and to be sweet is better than to be queen, for to be queen it is only necessary to be born beneath a canopy embroidered with the regal R. Although I thought of Shakespeare’s phrase, I did not give utterance to the invitation which preceded it; you recollect the line: “Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty.”

It isn’t given to every man to be as bold as Shakespeare, even though he may be more alive to present opportunities.

Now, according to court etiquette, a subject dare not address his sovereign until he is spoken to, so I simply stood and looked unutterable things. Her gaze fell. The pause was becoming embarrassing.

That wasn’t what I had expected at all. All the books I had ever read about queens had quoted the ruler thusly: “Her Majesty is graciously pleased to incline her ear that she may hear the prayer of her servant.” I noticed that her ears kept their normal position, but I was not inclined to be fastidious: the queen had spoken!

“Oh, to be sure,” Her Grace said, with ready recollection. “You are the novelist who said so many nice things about me in ‘The Virgin Throned in the West.’ You possess the first requisite of a courtier: a knowledge of the gentle art of flattery. Your compliments—”

“Spare me, good Queen,” I interrupted. “I must confess that I wrote that eulogy before I had seen your Majesty.”

“Why need you have said that?” she asked. “Even an immortal queen is enough like her mortal sisters not to relish a stab at vanity. You men praise us women and then ruffle our hair by saying you didn’t mean it. Of course, we forgive you, but to forget is not so easy. Under the scar, the wound still aches.”

Ever since then I have believed that a man should be arrested for exposing the naked truth.

“In that book you also paid tender tribute to the babies, though I fail to see what they have to do with an old maid queen who achieved fame but not matrimony. Let us hope that tribute, at least, is sincere.”

“No, only sentimental. I wrote that eulogy far from the maddening child, with naught but memory to lend wings to the imagination. I love to play with other people’s toddling darlings until there is a cry of distress from the interior department, in which case distance lends enchantment to the point of view. I have not always said nice things about babies, for, as I heard Methuselah say, there comes a time in the life of every man when he sighs for the power of Herod that he might order all children killed. Methuselah excepted his own; I don’t.”

“I crave Your Grace’s pardon,” I disagreed; “it is true: that is all.”

“Thy reproof, O Queen, is deserved. Would that I were Boswell to preserve in the amber of biography the gems which fall from the lips of a Doctress Johnson.”

“Scribe, know you not that a woman would rather you praised her face than her mind, and her[Pg 81] bonnet rather than her ‘blue stockings’? Why write what you don’t believe?”

“Had my eyes been gladdened by the sight of your charms, fair Queen,” I boldly asserted, “I should have thrown off the fetters of prose and soared to the Mount of Parnassus, there to coronate you in verse with feet iambic.”

“Perhaps the feet might limp—I mean they would, of course, be limpidly lyrical. But my poet laureate, don’t metrically measure My Majesty. Cork the rhythmic bottle and all shall be forgiven. And now you may tell me your mission.”

“I’ve come to interview you,” I blurted out, instinctively putting my hand on my vest pocket, in which was a bottle of aromatic spirits of ammonia. But Her Grace has a spirit of her own and needed none of mine. There was no evidence of vertigo.

“Don’t be alarmed,” I hastened to say. It was a needless assurance, but according to all precedent, I was expected to make the observation. “I wrote the interview before I came down here to see you, and it is now in type with a turn rule at the end for fear it should not measure up to expectations. This call is a mere matter of form.”

“That’s a secret. Instead of answering your question, allow me to ask you another. Suppose you were again an earthly ruler with unlimited power, what would you do?”

“I hardly know,” she confessed naively and added: “But I think my first move would be to curb the freedom of the press by pensioning off all the newspaper men, so that we celebrities might have our fanciful fads without being interviewed. Not that I object to the interview or to the interviewer. ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’—to most men.”

“And fiction is more interesting than truth and much more believable—to most women,” I retorted. “You know Heine says that woman is at once apple and serpent. I have never dissented from that view, for apple sass and serpents’ tongues have always been the desserts woman serves up to man. Eve plucked the first fruit from the forbidden tree, but many another fair hand has since robbed the genealogical orchard. Thus do we ape our ancestors.”

“Poor Eve!” sympathized the queen. “Her daughters have often taken a bite of the enticing apple, but unlike their mother, it does not open their eyes to man’s true nature.”

“I have often wondered,” I went on, not heeding the amused smile of her Majesty, “why God didn’t make a dozen women instead of one out of Adam’s rib, but I’ve come to the conclusion that Eden would no longer have been Paradise to Eve if she had had a rival.”

“Where is man’s boasted chivalry?” suddenly asked Elizabeth. “Sir Walter never struck a woman with the whip of sarcasm.”

“With his cloak wrapped about her, she couldn’t feel the sting of satire,” I retorted.

“Did you ever hear how I repaid Sir Walter for his gallantry? We had gone to London to attend the coronation of King Edward the Seventh. One of the streets we had to cross was so muddy that we paused in dismay. A newsboy brushed up against me. Taking the papers from under his arm I tossed them into the street.”

“‘Tut! tut! keep on your coat, Sir Walter,’ I said. ‘Allow me to pilot you to yonder pavement dryshod.’”

“‘Good Queen Bess will never die,’ responded the baronet, with ready wit. Then he laughed as the newsboy picked up his papers from the muddy street, loudly bewailing the prank of the wind which had spoiled his stock in trade.”

Elizabeth again did violence to my conceptions of royalty by laughing at her own wit; then she said:

“Sir Scribe, it seems to me that you haven’t progressed well with your interview. You haven’t once indulged in those misfit personalities which bring your American papers so many libel suits. When I received your card I anticipated that I should be discussed by myself and dissected by you. I expected you would be concerned as to[Pg 84] whether my ancestors belonged to that little company of gentlemen who jumped from tree to tree in Africa and was prepared to tell you, as I have told Darwin, that even a baboon can have a respectable daughter!”

Being a blue point is not conducive to successful interviewing, so I shook off my lethargy and asked as to her favorite flower.

“That is better,” approved her Grace. “I have two favorites—bachelors’ buttons and mock orange blossoms.”

I did not press the point, for one naturally looks for modesty in a Virgin Queen.

“The reign of Terrible Teddy, by all means. Hesiod says there are five ages of the world; how is yours designated: golden, brazen, or—?”

“This is the age of folly—the folly of flesh,” I answered. “Higher critics deny the decalogue and bone Jonah’s fish until it resembles an eel. Even our modern writers play ping pong with hearts and the seventh commandment, for to them love is nothing unless it brings in ten per cent royalty. Society has become sensuous; we are having rather too much of the body. The[Pg 85] corsage serves no purpose but to hide the heart; bosom and back are bared before the footlights while gartered grace trips tantalizingly in the limelight. Soul has sunk beneath the seductions of the senses. The demon of desire so entices men that for the amorous allurement of Kipling’s Vampire—the woman who did not care—they would go to Hell and consider the trip an enjoyable excursion. Has virtue fled to hide its blushes in a nunnery and is there no longer a shrine of sex? Is ‘Don Juan’ to be deified and ‘Camille’ to be glorified? Will—but in deference to Colonel Comstock, I really must desist.”

“Don’t deny it; a lost love is the only justification of a man’s being a misanthropist and a misogynist.”

“Won’t you kindly translate or at least tell me the language? Emerson always was a voiceless sphinx to me and foreign tongues are not articulate to ears deafened by the slang of the streets.”

“Don’t be silly! Your idiomatic Americanisms make muddy the well of English undefiled, but methinks the water is the clearer and the more sparkling after each stirring up.

“If you will promise no more interruptions, I will continue my lecture: Your eyes are too far gazing into the bygone to know to-day’s bliss or to foresee a confident tomorrow. You are forgetting[Pg 86] that while life roots in the past, it flowers in the present. To never exchange loving glances with the maiden of the moment, but to dishonor the day by looking off into the eyes of some dream darling who cannot come to your bosom is like another Enoch Arden’s hopeless gaze for a sail that never brings him again to the kisses of Annie Lee. If I mistake not, your name is a patent of your English ancestry, but without that leaf from your family tree, I should recognize you as a countryman; to be loyal to a sweetheart clasped and lost is possible only to the man whose cradle rocked between the English Channel and the Irish Sea. The Anglo-Saxon alone of all peoples can become a martyr to a memory.”

Whatever will power I possessed was necessary to keep my eyes away from the “maiden of the moment.” English blood may be phlegmatic enough to turn into ice water, but a twenty-years’ acquaintance with American girls will thaw the most frozen cardiac organ and render it susceptible to the wiles of any witch of a woman who in other days might have hanged at Salem. Elizabeth’s very voice was a caress and sometimes a man forgets to pray, “Lead me not into temptation!”

“The sweeter memories are in themselves,” I murmured, “the more loth one is to share them with another. If it please Your Grace, we won’t discuss the—the ‘other girl.’ When a man proposes and the woman disposes of him by a verbal spanking, sending him away, it may be to the embraces[Pg 87] of another girl, it may be to cherish a memory, he is seldom in a frame of mind inculcated by gospel precepts. Gratitude comes later. Yet whether a man marries or whether he remains true to his ideal, he never loves any other woman quite so much as she who was pitiless to his pleading. Man’s heart is not like a Manhattan hall room with space for only one pair of shoes under the bed, but it is a St. Regis, in which there are no vacant guest chambers. The cosiest corner of a man’s heart is always reserved for the woman who has refused his hand.”

“A misogamist also! I am just dying with curiosity to know what terrible things my sex have done to you to make you a hater of men, of women and of marriage. Because some sunflower of a girl has turned her face to another son is no excuse for you to sulk behind a cloud. This may be the age of folly, as you claim, but don’t you think that the greatest fool is he who allows a slip of a girl to rob him of his couleur de rose spectacles? Come now, ’fess up! Aren’t you making a hobby of being a hypochondriac? If you linger among the graves of the gloaming with a heart so full of shadows and eyes so abrim with tears that you cannot see beauty as it is born, you corrupt the present. If you fellowship with to-day, it will bestow upon you its purple. If you bid away[Pg 88] the hour that is here to make you happy, all the grief of Niobe will not win it back again. To-day is a nomad who tarries awhile, then folds his tent and whistles away on his happy gypsy journey, never to return.”

“Aren’t we getting rather too philosophical for actors in an opera bouffe and too solemn for characters in an hysterical novel; nobody takes history seriously nowadays. This is the hour of hyperbole as well as the age of folly and my indictment of fleshly fools should be taken cum grano salis. I am not so wrapped about by the despairs of night that I can get no glimpse of the dawn. I despise not the outward beauty, nor do I put contempt upon flesh nor call it unclean. I wield no surgeon’s scalpel to dissect desires which passion into degeneracy. Yet I deplore that man, who may stature divinely great, should stoop to crucify the mystery of the flesh in permitting the sanctities of the soul to be overshadowed by sensuality, in making vulgar that which should be hallowed. Yet humanity is no windfall apple; despite the blemishes on the rind, the core continues sound. However pessimistic a man may be, he must acknowledge that the influence of virtue is more far reaching than the contagion of vice. Jean Valjean in the Paris sewer was the optimist who originated the New Thought movement; like him, I feel instinctively that somewhere beyond the present darkness is the sunshine of life and safety.”

“You women have enjoyed a monopoly of that comfortable privilege altogether too long, and the time has come when man can dispute your prerogative.”

The asbestos tablets I had brought with me were rapidly being filled with hieroglyphics which looked like the original Greek and to understand them needed an acquaintance with Pitman; I must economize on my questions.

“The one indispensable interrogation in an interview is how you spend each waking moment of the day,” I hinted. “No post-mortem recollections would be complete without that.”

“To be a queen is to lead the life effective as well as the life strenuous. This is one day’s doings in the role of Regina, as ticked off by the hours—figuratively, of course, for you are aware that there are no clocks in Hades:

“By-the-bye,” she broke off suddenly, “Sir Isaac has become afflicted with writers’ cramp and I need someone to take his place. You are that someone.”

I knelt, expecting to feel the flat end of a sword laid upon me, but her Grace simply twined a lock of my blonde hair around her finger.

“Arise, Sir Scribe,” she said, glancing around apprehensively. “Your attitude is that of a lover proposing to his mistress, and as a penalty for posing in the upper world, Mephisto has decreed that whatever attitude a man assumes in Hades, he must set it to words or to music. I am going to be merciful and you may make of your proposal a frayed-out phonograph record which will repeat ‘I love you’ without variation. The warmth of your protestations may melt the wax? You need have no fear of that. You would be more likely to break the record; we do not use wax cylinders, but rubber. As for making you my official scribe, the touch of royalty is sufficient to confer knighthood. Since poor Walter took that ‘sharp remedy’ for all diseases, I have shunned the sword.”

Curiosity is my besetting sin—it is by no means a woman’s prerogative—and as it has been one of my fads to read a person’s character by a glance at his or her hands, I bowed in humble[Pg 91] gratitude at the honor conferred upon me, but not without an upward look at the fair hand poised gracefully above me. That fleeting glance told me much. Certain chroniclers of the period Before Darwin tell us that marks were made on the hands of men—and women?—that the sons of men might know them. As the passage occurs in Job, some higher critics interpret the marks to mean boils, but we palmists know better. Palmistry is Cupid masquerading in a scientific costume; it gives a man a valid excuse for holding a girl’s hand. Of course even a scribe can’t take such liberties with a queen, although the cunning of chiromancy prompted me to attempt a revelation of Her Majesty’s character. Just what I found in the hand that swayed the destinies of the world She made me promise not to tell. “God save the Queen—” and the Gentle Reader!

After detailing her destiny, I arose with a muttered apology for consuming so much of her time.

“It isn’t only time that is consumed in Hades, but if you wish to go, you may,” assented Her Grace. “I never argue with a bored sign post about the distance to the street.”

I bowed and left. Outside was a sign which read: “To New York—twenty miles.” I stood a moment and pondered. Twenty miles expressed a nearness which made Hades a suburb of the metropolis! The call of the city was[Pg 92] insistent, the lure of Broadway beckoned to the white lights and the clang of trolleys, but all about me were unfolding the wonders of the unknown Stygian country. I did not dispute the distance, nor did I heed the mute command. I simply turned my back on the sign post and walked away from the imperative pointing finger.

THE Asbestos Society of Sinners was in session. The subject of debate was, “Resolved that gold may be yellow, but it is not tainted.”

“‘An Englishman’s hell is want of money,’” mused Carlyle, repeating what he had said while a denizen of earth.

“It’s too bad he gets Hades in both the upper and lower worlds,” observed “Boss” Tweed, who as the reincarnated Dives handled the gavel. “Unfortunately, that condition is not confined to any one country. Wendell Phillips once said that if an American saw a silver dollar on the other side of Hell he would jump for it.”

“Is that why you came here?” asked he whose only claim to fame was that an ass had spoken to him.

“Baalam’s itchy palm spoiled him for a prophet,” observed Tweed, addressing the chairman, and ignoring that individual. “No, gentlemen, it wasn’t one dollar that brought me here. It was $10,000,000 or $100,000,000; I forget which.”

“A cypher more or less makes no difference,” put in Carlyle, cynically. He evidently thought this a side-splitting English joke, for he laughed at his own wit.

“Truly these be tainted times, if we can place any dependence in the New York correspondence of the Cimmerian Chatterbox,” volunteered Tweed. “Poor Diagones has had to give up his quest for an honest man: not being in the trust, he cannot buy any oil for his lantern. But even a searchlight wouldn’t help him in these days. An honest man never gets within the rays of the calcium; he is too busy picking the pockets of the people.”

“Oil and money will come uppermost at last in the caldron of watered stocks underneath which are the fires of Hell, for both are Standard.”

“I don’t see how tainted money can be made from refined oil.” It was Solomon the wise who spoke.

“Tainted money, like crude oil, may be refined,” asserted Tweed. “Yet even crude oil is not to be despised, for it accrues interest and some of the taint can be carbolized by sending bad rum to the heathen. It matters not what denomination tainted money is in, although the Baptists ought to be able to wash some of the taint away. In to-day’s issue of the Stygian Siftings, I read that a certain sect who won’t trust any other denomination to read their Bible for them, say that the pilfered pelf of frenzied financiers is all right if it be used for good purposes. It isn’t even necessary to keep the dirty dough in a separate flour barrel from the certified wheat; they are willing to convert tares and all into breakfast food. It resolves itself into a case of homeopathic treatment—the use of tainted money to remove a greater taint.”

“Bribery, which in evening dress is called graft, has become such a popular pastime that the refusal of a man to touch money offered him leads one to the conclusion that it is not tainted but merely counterfeit,” said Shylock, as he tried to hide some degraded ducats in his blouse. “They wouldn’t let me shed one drop of blood, yet to-day the American capitalist gets his pound of flesh by bleeding the people.”

“It’s a wonder Atlas wasn’t exposed for holding up the earth,” mused Anon. “Since the days of the gods, many a man has had his shoulder put[Pg 98] out of joint trying to do the same stunt, but the weight of the world is still cause for worry.”

“So deep-rooted in the universe is graft,” asserted Tweed, “that the chairman of an investigating committee, in making his report, went to the Jersey shore and looking out to sea, wrote: ‘I can see no graft.’ Even then he forgot the ship-building trust and also overlooked the unimportant fact that his very words were grafted from Lord Nelson.”

“Adam would have been had he been tempted with a plum instead of with an apple.”

“Graft,” explained Noah, surnamed Webster, “is a botanical term for ‘splitting straws’ in the garden politic. Its principal fruits are plums, leafing out in ‘long green.’ A grafter is a captain of industry who has been found out.”

“All men bow to the despotism of the dollar,” said a well-known anarchist with an unforgivable name. “It is no longer the divine right of kingship, but the divine right of dollarship, to rule the earth. The rulers of old had their armies and forced obedience; the rulers of to-day have their money bags and buy it.”

“The dollar,” declared Alexander Hamilton, “is the corner-stone of our egotistic civilization, and the dollar is terribly hard. Its hardness may make it better as a corner-stone but does not especially fit it for use as a pillow for tired humanity.”

“Growing socialistic, eh? My dear Alexander, you have been exclusive owner of six feet of land long enough to be cured of that fanciful fad.”

“Fads,” interposed Worcester, noting that Webster was ready with a definition and anxious to forestall him, “is a diversion of the wealthy and the only game on which Parker Brothers have no copyright. It is played similar to ‘Pit’ and ‘Bluff,’ although it is not confined to Wall Street.”

“Fancies,” declaimed Johnson, “is a vivid imagination diluted with printers’ ink for the purpose of converting the skeleton in the family flat into $1,500 cash. Usually the man who has ancestors doesn’t court investigation.”

“Investigation,” defined Roget, “is a popular kind of bookkeeping begun after the race is lost and the money is spent; a locking of the safe deposit doors after the deposits are safe in the cashier’s pocket. As the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, Adam, being fatherless, is the only man in Hades whom the Stygian Insurance Company would guarantee immune from the epidemic of investigation which has been transplanted from the upper to the lower world. But even Adam suffered exposure before he plucked the ‘long green’ from the fig tree.”

“In England insurance is called assurance, but the name better applies to American directors, whom it assures a life of luxury. The policy[Pg 100] holder believes insurance is a legacy, but his widow discovers it is a law suit. Life insurance is a bogie at which everybody not in a glass coffin throws a stone. It is old, tried and true: too old to notice you after you’re dead; true—to its officers; and tried—in the courts. It makes sick loans which have the effect of paralyzing the tongues of its officials or sending them to Europe in search of health.”

“Knowledge is no longer power,” denied Webster; “wealth has taken its place. Even both ends of Wall Street can be made to meet. At one end is the aspiring finger of Trinity Church, pointing to the sky, and at its foot is a cemetery. At the other end is the first station on the road to Brooklyn and—another cemetery!”

“Gold itself is pure,” observed Portia, LL.D.; “it becomes defiled only in passing through dirty fingers. Tainted money may be exchanged for gold that isn’t greasy at the mint and no questions asked. The filth from the bad man’s fingers doesn’t take away the value of the larcenous long green, or of the sullied silver.”

“In my time,” said Tweed, “we didn’t ask whether money was tainted before we took it. There’s time enough for an investigation after the trust treasure is spent, and suspicious specie never becomes penitential pesos until after money has ceased to talk. Riches are promised to the righteous man—which we all are until the newspapers find us out. Every millionaire secured[Pg 101] his wealth honestly with two exceptions, neither of which are noted in the newspapers.”

“You know it is said,” observed Cæsar, “that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

“If that includes Cleopatra’s needle, there is still hope for the rich man,” put in Marc Antony.

“A note of protest won’t pay your debts, so what’s the use of all this outcry about opprobrious opulence?” asked Tweed. “Who can scent from afar the possibilities of graft quicker than the man who is counting up his censurable coin? Among the crowd in full cry after a fleeing burglar with his pockets full of soiled silver, none shouts ‘stop thief’ more lustily than the pal who did not get his share of the plunder. In the rustle of the competitor’s greenbacks which are tainted with the tears of women and the blood of men, no capitalist hears the cry of the widow and orphan more quickly than he who is seeking to shear the fleece of an innocent and confiding lot of lambs swallowed in the vortex of frenzied finance.”

“How about the tainted tricks of politics?” I asked. “I might have been a politician myself if I hadn’t been converted and so became a newspaper man instead.”

“Your position is now more hopeless than ever, for you not only know all the tricks of the politician, but those of the newspaper man as well,” retaliated Tweed.

“Money, the devil’s pass key, has securely locked more than one skeleton safely away in the family closet,” I continued. “After all, we can’t get along without the disreputable dough. If a rotting log nurture a bank of violets, it would be folly to despise the flowers because they sprang from a tainted source.”

“It would be well if the twentieth century had a Lycurgus,” commented Plutarch. “For the purpose of sapping the foundation of avarice, he called in all the nefarious nuggets and decreed that iron should be used as current coin. If modern millionaires had to drive a yoke of oxen to carry home each $88 in dividends, the iron would enter their souls far more readily than into their pocketbooks.”

“So they are. A check is drawn for each man who has his price, to stop him from branding his neighbor a thief. Never analyze the gold given as a gift. Does it matter which cow gave the skimmed milk if we get the cream? If our pocketbook is made corpulent enough to choke our scruples, shall we inquire if our benefactor has cobwebs on his conscience? A man’s criminality ought not to be based on the size of his bank account.”

“Greed and graft have always been blood money relations,” I said. “In the dawn of history Adam owned the whole world except one little tree and he wouldn’t be happy till he got that.”

“You would have been a multi-billionaire if you had held onto all your real estate. But perhaps, like Ann Drew Karnagee, you thought it a sin to die rich after living in the tainted atmosphere of affluence.”

“Then there was Cæsar. He ran up a supper bill of twenty-five million in four months. My authority? Never mind; it’s all down somewhere.”

“You are right,” agreed Plutarch. “The turning of tarnished tin into trust treasure isn’t confined to any one decade. Even Prometheus was guilty of petty larceny, for he stole fire from heaven and—”

“If you grasp the burning ploughshare of ill-gotten gains, do not complain if it sears your palms and scorches your brain and petrifies your heart.” Thus spoke Judas and departed.

“Mortals say that money cannot be carried beyond the grave,” explained Tweed; “but there is spirit money as well as spirit men. Grafter Judas hanged himself to get rid of thirty pieces of silver—foolish man! How little fitted he would have been for life in New York; on the board of aldermen, for instance, or as a district boss. We New Yorkers are frequently afflicted with itching palms, but money never burns our fingers as it does that of Judas in Hades. He throws it away,[Pg 104] but it always returns to his grasp. If I had been empowered with the same necromancy on earth, I could have been president of the United States. Possessing Judas’ faculty, I could have paid each man his price and yet the money would always have returned!”

“In the scales of God,” declaimed Portia, “charity will outweigh gold, unless Dives and Lazarus have changed places since the last tidings we had of them.”

“For all that,” concluded Tweed, “the only objection I ever found to tainted money was that ‘taint enough! A little thieving is a dangerous thing; graft much or you’ll taste the penitentiary spring. Though Justice is blind, she isn’t deaf, and he who can jingle the most gold usually wins his case. The man who sent me to the island said, ‘I hope to see you in hell some day,’ and I’ve wondered ever since which of us he was doubtful about getting here.”

ALL was quiet along the Styx. The river banks were deserted. Cæsar had been called to court to testify against a counterfeiter who had been punching his head, and Charon took advantage of the Roman’s absence to call upon his wife Calpurnia, famed as being the only woman of whom it was said she was above suspicion. Charon’s craft, which to-day happened to be no more than an ordinary rowboat, was pulled up on the bank. In his haste to depart, the ferryman had even left his oars lying loose in the locks. I was[Pg 108] considering the advisability of attempting to row back to Harlem when my attention was diverted by three dogs swimming in the placid waters of the Styx. Sitting astride them with all the ease of a circus clown was a boy whose forehead was branded thus: $——. It was the mark of Cain; therefore this must be the bad boy himself.

As they drew nearer, I discovered that there was only one dog instead of three; it was the many-headed Cerberus. All went well until Cain pulled the dog’s tail. Then the nearest head snapped at the lad so quickly that he disappeared down its throat. Jonah had now arrived on the scene, and enraged at this infringement on his copyright, he caught the canine by its hind legs and holding it aloft, shook it vigorously. Cain dropped out of the centre cavity in the dog’s delta with a lighted stogie between his teeth. He tossed the nicotine nugget to Jonah and bade him take the canine to the pound of Pluto.

“Charge it up to Pa,” the bad boy said airily. Jonah continued to hold out his hand.

“No credit is given in Hell,” he sneered. “You’ve got to cash in all your checks.”

Cain put his hand in the outstretched palm, but instead of the expected gold, he dropped therein the burning Stygian stogie.

Who polluteth his lips with blasphemy? Who imperilleth his parliamentary standing? Who yelleth in Sanskrit and Yiddish? Ask of the boy; he is of age and can speak for himself.

“Despite the doubts cast upon my parentage by Darwin, I am Adam’s son,” he said, in response to my question. “But, say, I’m an angel with wings full grown compared with what Pa was when he was a boy.”

“Do tell me about the time Adam was a boy,” I implored. In imagination I saw a spilling of red ink over the first page of the New York Universe: “Adam’s Own Story of the Rise and Fall of Man.”

“Dad and Darwin do beat creation,” Cain commented. “The delineator of the ‘Descent of Man’ says that the earth grew as naturally as a mushroom on a dung heap. Since hearing of it, Topsy has been giving herself airs under the impression that as she ‘just growed,’ she was the first woman. Adam says he doesn’t mind being called a myth by the higher critics, but when an Afro-American minister proves by logic as indisputable as a proposition in Euclid that the oldest inhabitant was a black man, and when Topsy lays claim to being his wife, he thinks it’s about time to draw the color line. Job tried to comfort Pa by telling him that it is better to be a myth than a martyr, for martyrs are burned that myths may live.”

“Oh, she is an allegory, too. The legend of the lady of the pippins was generated into the[Pg 110] genius of Genesis for the sole purpose of stimulating the cerebral cells of the clergymen whose imaginations have become stunted by much raking for Greek roots. Despite the ancient scandal when she listened to the solo of the serpent—and the result proved so disastrous woman has never been inclined to listen to any voice but her own since that distant day—Eve actually asked Adam to buy her one of those serpentine dresses the next time he went to Vanity Valley-on-the-Hudson. Pa replied that because other women were reverting to the original clinging fig-leaf garb, was no reason why she should advertise her shame to the world.

“‘To be fashionable is better than to be a Puritan mother,’ Eve retorted. A woman can find comfort in a new garter or a picture hat even when a scandal is hanging over her backbone.”

“Eve’s appetite for apples, which gave the world dyspepsia and all the ills to which flesh is heir, has been thrown up in her face ever since the world began. Come to think of it, though, Darwin says there never was any beginning.”

“Darwin has had his day,” I observed. “His teaching is now obsolete. Some day I’m going to write a book—everybody does these days—and I have already copyrighted the title, so literary pirates may beware. It is to be called ‘The Ascent of Man.’ No more is man the old Adam,[Pg 111] the Eden of his perfect behind him forbidding its gardens of delight. In his present imperfect is the creative hauntings of the perfect he is yet to be. As in the old days the man said, ‘The woman’—so it is the woman who has given man the new birth. Creation always did centre about a petticoat, fables and creeds to the contrary notwithstanding.”

“I asked Mother Eve about her childhood the other day, and she seemed lamentably ignorant of her younger days.”

“If Adam hadn’t gone to sleep there would have been no women in the world,” I put in. Having a reputation as a confirmed misogynist, I felt that I must live up to it whenever occasion offered.

“The queer part of it,” mused Cain, “is that he never woke up when the surgical operation was being performed and that, too, in the days when anæsthetics kept themselves hid in unpressed poppy pods. Catch a woman letting anybody take a rib from her without her knowing it!”

“If woman is so wide-awake, how was it that Eve lost her certificate of character by getting drunk on apple cider?”

“With the permission of Darwin and the rest, I will give you a revised version of the creation by the first higher critic—Cain, son of Adam and Eve:

“And Cosmos continued to apply cosmetics to[Pg 112] the face of the Globe and—Darwin was too busy to take notice.

“And it came to pass that without Darwin to hold the universe in check, revolution arose; from revolution came evolution and evolution evolved into molecules which came into contact with protoplasm and by natural selection the latter survived and became a plastic cell which in turn threw a fit and degenerated into the primordial germ, which is the germ of truth. This selection was so unnatural that it did not survive protogene and to swallow this up there came an ocean of eocene.

“And it came to pass that in the aeon of eocene there was enwombed in the chaotic chasm, later called Siam, a Simiad who was to show his relationship to the octopus by embracing the earth. And this Simiad grew according to his own fancy and—Darwin still slumbered.

“And the merry morn tagged the shadows of night and became ‘it’. The number of the evening hours was eleven and of the day was twelve. Eleven and twelve make twenty-three—that’s the sum that spells ‘skidoo’. And the night departed in haste.

“And in the time when it seemed good to him, Darwin awoke and made two great lights, the greater arc to rule the day and the lesser incandescent to rule the night. And Darwin was the greater and Professor Huxley was the lesser; he made Herbert Spencer also.

“And behold! the man, because he had within him all other men, spoke Henry James English in all its simplicity from his birth up. Mother Earth sang lullabies to him, but the man was sore vexed at his mater’s nonsense verses and comic opera lyrics; he swore a Saxon oath. That being the first word he had uttered, the man was called Adam. And all in the world there was none other like him.

“Now when the evening and the morning were the fifth day, Darwin began to sit up and take notice. He took a leaf from Adam’s birth record and by soaking it in alcohol over night, words became visible and he read that in the primordial epoch when in the transition period Adam was a kangaroo, a woman started to sprout from the seed of truth, but the coming man thought she had better lie a little longer, and so he stunted her truth-telling for all time by thrusting her into the tobacco pouch of his kangaroo hide, knowing that there is no stunt like tobacco.

“Eve was content to come after man for three reasons; first, she knew it was fashionable to arrive late; second, she was timid and wanted Mr. Adam to see how the land lay now that the waters had been divided; third, she was having some clothes made for her debut and even with the assistance of Prof. Huxley, Tailor Darwin had not been able to get them ready on time.

“Though eternal despairs deepened their nights[Pg 114] about him, Adam was in a jolly mood and he said: ‘Let us make light of it’—and there was light!

“And when Eden was effulgent Darwin could see the man he had made and he saw that it was good. He was positive of that but was comparatively sure he could do better, so he hypnotized Adam by telling him he had appendicitis and that an operation was necessary for his future well-being as a man, now that he had ceased to be a monkey. Dad had never studied physiology—though he made up for it later by dissecting Eve every chance he got,—and so he did not wonder how it came about that the only portion of his anatomy for which he no longer had a use, having given up climbing trees as being too undignified a diversion, had gotten so far up as to tickle him in the ribs. He remembered that saying about man being fearfully and wonderfully made, and being assured by Dr. Darwin that the operation for the removal of ‘a rag and a bone and a hank of hair’ was as safe as an Hom pill, he quietly fell asleep.

“That is how man came to lose his tail, for contrary to report, Darwin did not give man a tail but took one away; contrary also to the authorized version, woman was made out of man’s tail and not from his rib. Kipling little knew how apt was his descriptive tag, for the tail consisted of a bone covered with a hank of hair and the dinosaur supplied the rag by tying a tin can to Adam’s tail. Thus man evolved like the tadpole, which[Pg 115] does not have to hire George Washington to do the woodsman stunt, as Nature arranges for the chopping off of its tail at the accepted time. What Nature does for the tadpole, Dr. Darwin did for man. But he bungled the job and cut the tail off too short. That’s the reason appendicitis is prevalent to-day.

“And when Darwin looked on the woman he forgot his grammar and broke out into superlatives without the justification of the rule of three: ‘This is the most barbarous cut of all.’

“For this unkind reflection on her Marcel Wave and also for the reason that Mr. Darwin spared her costume but not her modesty, Eve condemned man to wear clothes for all time.

“And as the evening and the morning were the sixth day, Darwin called to the woman: ‘This man thou shalt call Adam, surnamed Smith.’ Likewise to the man he said: ‘Whilst thou lovest this woman, her name shall be called Evelyn and her children shall be called the daughters of Evelyn, but when thy love groweth cold like the night, she shall be thy Eve. As the first parents, so shall be all posterity.’

“And as he spoke so was it. Man’s love was as brief as the life of last year’s calendar, and ever since the year one, women have been called the daughters of Eve.

“Thus is fulfilled the prophecy of Darwin, as interpreted by the firstborn of the earth, Cain Smythe of Eden.”

By the time Cain had completed his recital, we had reached an extensive estate in the suburbs of Cimmeria.

“Haven’t you heard that E. P. Roe has driven us back to Eden? At first Mother didn’t want to come, for contrary to legendary lore, Eden is situated at the North Pole. It is pretty cold when one’s only covering is a shiver and the shadow of the Arctic circle. The only way Eve could keep warm was by reading Jonathan Edwards’ sermons. She was especially interested in the one wherein he said that sinners are held over the pit[Pg 120] of hell as one holds a spider or some other—the ‘other’ is mine: I have to correct his grammar as well as his theology—loathsome insect over the fire.

“After reading that, nothing would do for Mother Eve but that she must cease shivering and become a sinner in order to have a hot time. Of course being a woman, the snake could not resist her fascination, and so she had no more reason to complain of the cold. Roe tried to open a chestnut burr, pricked his fingers and got so mad that he drove the old folks back to Eden. Mother Eve flirted with a Stygian plumber until she got him to put hot air pipes from Jonathan Edwards’ crematory to the Aiden roof garden. Weatherwise, the mater is again comfortable.”

Adam and Eve were eating apples under the trees as we entered the Garden. So glad was Eve to see a man who wasn’t a shade that she put a pair of cherry lips to mine with a resounding smack.

“There was a time,” I observed, “when I thought it better to welcome the sting of a wasp rather than the kiss of a woman, but that was before I had come in contact with a wasp and before I had been kissed by a woman. Both have taught me that I knew neither wasps nor women and that all things alliterative are not synonymous.”

Adam seemed anxious to change the subject from osculation to the origin of things kissable, and to a man, of course, the only things kissable are sweet little bits of laughing gurgling femininity.

“Doubtless you would be interested in my first impressions of my helpmeet,” he said, “so I will give you the Genesis of Revelation. When I was a boy—”

“He always gets childish after dinner,” whispered Eve in an aside to me. Adam filled in the interruption by whittling on a toothpick. “I’m glad he has a plentiful stock of lumber, for if you can keep him whittling, you can get everything out of him except the truth. He thinks he cuts a chunk out of history every time he flourishes his jack-knife. The shavings he sells to the breakfast-food trust.”

“When I was a boy,” continued Adam, “I invariably spoke in the first person, because I was the first person, but as Eve is my better half I am now only a third, so in future I will not even use the editorial ‘we,’ but simply ‘the man’.”

“You’re not in America, where the children bring up the parents,” reproved Eve. “Besides, your information is but second-hand, for you were ‘among those absent’.”

“Eve was bone of my bone,” continued Adam,[Pg 122] “but not flesh of my flesh. When I first set eyes on the woman she had not enough adipose tissue to impair in an infinitesimal degree the rapid penetration of an X-ray; in fact, from Cosmos to Cleopatra, woman has evaded the searching inquiry of the X and is still an unknown quantity.”

“That came about very naturally, as did everything in those days. When the man and the woman were put in Eden, they were told that everything should be kept decently and in order. Now in those days, the English tongue had not reached the perfection it has to-day under the clarifying influences of the spelling reform. There was no Trench to tell us the use of the words and no popular novelists to bone the dictionary as a chef does a bird. Eve’s education had been sadly neglected. She didn’t know just what kind of order was meant and there was no ‘Complete Housekeeper’ which could be consulted and no ‘Answers to Correspondents’ column in a newspaper to aid her. So she sat down and folded her hands.

“There is an aphorism that Satan finds ‘mischief still for idle hands to do,’ and so when he saw that Eve left the dishes unwashed and her hair uncombed, he said, ‘Presto, change!’ and was turned into a snake.

“Now it came to pass that the woman listened[Pg 123] to the voice of the charmer. Satan told of her grace and beauty, which Adam took as a matter of course after the first day and ceased to comment thereon, whereat the woman’s heart grew troubled.

“If you wish to know wherein you have failed to provide for the wife of your bosom, you will find your neighbors well informed on the subject. Adam might have learned much from the snake, for Eve poured her woe into sympathetic ears—if snakes have ears. She wanted to know what was the best kind of order.

“‘Apple-pie order,’ advised Satan promptly. Then being a lawyer, he peeled off an apple-ate laugh.

“Eve related how her husband had tired of her and had taken to sleeping night and day in the hope that Darwin might take the hint and find use for another of his ribs—Adam had not yet been put wise to the fact that he was minus a tail and thought that he could populate a harem by dispensing with his ribs.

“The next day the serpent made another social call on Mistress Eve, who tearfully besought a recipe for winning back her husband’s alienated affections. Satan pondered a moment; then he said:

“‘You can’t please Adam, your husband, unless you give him apple pie—the kind his mother used to make.’ Satan chuckled at the joke; he thought it so good that he vowed it should be retold in every age as a memorial of the fall.

“‘Give Adam some sass and then you can have everything in apple-pie order,’ hissed the snake.

“But Satan had been cunning in transforming himself into a snake instead of into a monkey, for he reminded Eve that he had no arms and she must pick the fruit herself. This she did and then the serpent said all good cooks tasted the ingredients to test their fitness for use. Eve took a bite of the pippin; then she called Adam to get the core. They liked the apple so well neither could wait for the pies to cook, but ate up all the forbidden fruit.

“Sans bathing suit and sans modesty, Adam was taking a sun bath on the beach, looking longingly over the gates of Eden at the wide world outside when Landlord Darwin appeared.

“Adam tried to put on a bold front, but as his linen was in the wash and he had never been bell-boy in a hotel, he failed miserably. He blushed at the exposure and was mercifully covered with confusion.

“‘I may as well tell the naked truth,’ he confessed. ‘I’ve been swimming, and the woman thou gavest me did steal my clothes, saying that to be in style she must have a tailor-made suit.’

“So Eve became the original new woman and ever since then the Edenless Adams have called marriage a failure whenever they couldn’t lay the[Pg 125] blame on the woman. And Eve—well, she can make apple pies as good as she ever did!”

“But that green apple gave Mother Eve a belly ache,” ejaculated Cain, “and I came to deliver her. She has since said that wasn’t the last time I gave her a pain, but one can excuse her using slang after associating with such a fabulistic personage as Æsop.

“You would have lacerated laughter could you have seen Dad when the Ichthyosaurus—the mother-in-Latin of the stork—brought me to Eden. The chimney wasn’t large enough for the reptile relic of the Mesozoic age to crawl down, so it carelessly dropped me onto the stomach of the astonished Father Adam, breaking what has since been known as the floating rib. From that accident arose the legend that woman was made of the crookedest part of man, which was the reason she couldn’t keep him straight.

“Eve welcomed me all right, for a mother takes to babies and goo goo talk as naturally as ducks take to water, but Adam felt queer—out of place; he didn’t quite understand the thing and wondered why I hadn’t been born full-grown. He didn’t know whether I was a new kind of breakfast food, a condensed milk advertisement, or an alarm clock sent to wake him up early in the morning. Most of the time I was cutting my teeth, Dad was sulking out in the backyard under the apple tree with a pretty well-developed case of green eye[Pg 126] and the blues. Occasionally he would come in and try to smile as he peeped over in the couch of fig leaves. Then Eve would take me up and hand me to Papa. He took me as if he were afraid I would bite and held me out at arm’s length as if he thought the thing might melt and ruin his full dress suit, which consisted of a smile minus the fig leaves. I understand that evening dress has differed little from that day to this.”

“I confess that I am lamentably ignorant on the subject, but I find Henry James more lucid than the naturalists who wrote ‘Wild Men I Have Known.’ What was the origin of species?”

“With all deference to Darwin and the rest,” explained Cain, “methinks it was an apple seed!”

HADES has two newspapers to mirror forth the daily doings of the Stygian smart set. Owing to the uncounted population of the resort, these publications have circulations which would make the most yellow of earthly journals grow pink with envy. Here are some clippings from recent issues of the rival newspapers:

THE CIMMERIAN CHATTERBOX

Published Every Little While to Keep Pace
with the Largest Circulation Lies
of the American Press.

Edited by Horace Greeley and other defeated politicians, who tell the truth if the man is not a subscriber, and print all the news that doesn’t make a lightning coupling with the waste basket.

Domestic News: Registering the Vote—It is no sinecure to be registrar of voters in Hades. If[Pg 130] you think it is, ask “Boss” Tweed, who threw up his job to Matt Quay, who is sticking it out, though it take all eternity. Many of those who take up their residence on the banks of the Styx know little about themselves and less about their ancestors. Notwithstanding this, there are few people in Hades who haven’t stood up before the registrar to have their noses counted, and the endeavor has been to have every Tom, Dick, and Harry, as well as every Jane, Mary, and Anne on the list. The age of Anne and also the more famous age of Elizabeth gave the registrar some trouble at first, but after telling the “eternal feminine” that no affidavit or birth certificate is required with the age declaration, the statistics became less alarming to the fair sex.

There are some people, however, who think that to right a lie it is only necessary to write one and so requested blanks which they later mailed to Quay, the head nose enumerator. In this way they could tell what their age has been, without the annoyance of seeing the ungallant smile of unbelief depicted on the registrar’s face as he marks down “age 16” in his book and mentally adds fifteen as in the days when he studied oral arithmetic. Many a woman’s figure belies the statement that “figures can’t lie.” While the unwritten law of chivalry makes it rude to ask a lady’s age, the law of Hades gives a man the right to estimate her age if the lady slams the door in his face.[Pg 131] Woman’s rights are still a subject for debate. You can tell the age of a horse by his teeth, but no man can tell a woman’s age by her lack of gray hairs.

STYGIAN SIFTINGS.

Printers’ Pi Cooked to a Crisp for the Delectation of Lovers of Realism, and Served Hot from the Griddle of Our Reporter’s Imagination.

N. B.—We have the largest circulation and we can prove it. We always arrange the event to suit the “extra.” Our paper is read; our contemporary is redder. Imitation is the sincerest proof of color blindness. We print all the news that no one else will print. It’s all here and all untrue. If you see it in the Siftings, you may be excused for having your doubts. We cater to the great reading public, not to the Sunday School. There is no hyphenated heaviness in this paper. Our motto: More muck to mix.

EDITORIAL: AN ELECTION PROPHECY.

Owing to the many claims presented, the Stygian Siftings acknowledges that it is a difficult[Pg 132] matter to decide who has been the greatest benefactor to Hell, but we think Nero should be accorded the palm. We say this not because we wish to play favorites, but merely for the sake of harmony, which we believe would be best secured by the selection of Nero, the violinist, at the coming election to fill the position of janitor in the hall of fame.

NERO RECALLED FROM THE CATACOMBS.

We do not reprint legends of the bib and rattle, so we treat our contemporary with the contemptuous silence which it deserves. Its scissor blades are longer than the nose of its editor. A subsidized press, which the Stygian Siftings is known to be, is unworthy of notice. But to the candidate put forth, whose conduct needs careful editing and much blue pencil, we would apostrophize thusly: Nero, your only claim to fame is that you murdered your mother, kicked your wife down stairs and made Rome howl while you painted the town red. Many another man has done all three and only got his picture in the rogues’ gallery and the newspapers in return for his efforts. Nero, put that upon your catgut and play it to the shades[Pg 133] of the tunes you have murdered! Nero was born without whiskers and he’s had many a close shave since then. Who was the first shaver? A coupon for a hair cut and a cup of red ink given for the best answer!

THE CANDIDATE SPEAKS.

Ladies and Fellow-Citizens—If it please the ladies, I come to speak in my own behalf and crave your attention and your vote. As there appears to be no other candidate who is so anxious for the office of janitor of the hall of fame and general benefactor of Hades as I, it seems to me that no other qualifications are needed. However, there are some persons who are conceited enough to imagine that they will give me a hard run for my money. Why, fellow-citizens and voters, these men are not even natives of this fair country, the finest the sun forgot to shine upon! ‘Tis true they have been naturalized, but they never can be civilized. They may have push and cheek, but they lack the pull to get there.

Some men are so suspicious that they won’t take stock in anything except the thermometer; under the present climatic conditions in Hades,[Pg 134] that is bound to rise. The time for prejudice is past. It may be necessary to remind the opposition that we are a populous community. We have not taken into our limits any farm lands. In all our borders there are only solid blocks of houses with here and there a football park, where the players may break each other’s bones on the gridiron. There are other institutions to which we might refer with pride, but the metropolitan press is stirring them up with a muck rake. We own up to all the charges made and herein we differ from summer resorts up on the earth, where they sit on the lid and say their prayers, and then lie a little about the real condition of things in their community. The Stygianite, who lives in the earth and not on it, cannot prevaricate without being found out. He owns up whenever he has to, and that is pretty often. Up on earth, however, descendants of Ananias are as numberless as the hairs on the head of an after-taking advertisement.

I do not desire to answer the idiotorial attack of the editor of the Cimmerian Chatterbox, for I agree with him that it is better to boil your candidates in printers’ ink before election than to roast them afterward.

If I decide to accept the office which the chairman of the Roman executive committee assures me will be tendered to the only Nero, I promise you all exemption from taxes, divorce without[Pg 135] six months’ probation in the backwoods—anything and everything you ask shall be yours. You deposit the ballot; Nero will do the rest.

Among the reforms I intend to institute will be a wholesale cleaning of Hades. I will put fresh paint on the houses daily to keep Alexander from wearing out the buildings by leaning against them. I will install couches in the public parks for men who have run for office so much that they must be tired, and I will not debar any of the candidates I defeat from six feet of Squatters’ Ground. I will even distribute campaign mirrors to others who would like to see themselves as I see them. Of course I believe that the man should seek the office, but the only reason I ask for your votes is so that I may have another office to put on my official letter-head. I’m not sure I can find room for it, but I can increase the size of the paper and perhaps employ another typewriter. Don’t be like a balance wheel, ready to move in either direction on the slightest provocation. The man who borrows trouble on election day must return the goods if he bets on the wrong man. Never mind if the reformers ask: “Where did he get it?” Every politician knows where his graft comes from; call on me the day after election and I’ll see that you all get yours. Don’t sell your vote for a mess of political pottage without seeing the color of my long green.

And now I must conclude, for my voice is[Pg 136] husky with much speaking. Most of the great orators are dead. Cicero is dead; Demosthenes is dead, and to tell the truth, gentlemen, I don’t feel very much alive myself! (Great applause.)

NERO’S LETTER OF ACCEPTANCE.

To the Dilettante Political Club: Greeting—It is with pleasure that I accept the endorsement of your distinguished body. All I ask is that if the voters don’t feel like giving the position to me, kindly turn down the other fellows. Alexander and Louis XIV. will serve their constitutions, but not their country. They offered their services in the late unpleasantness, but only on condition that they were not to leave the country unless the enemy entered it. Your endorsement of me has been hanging over their heads like a dynamite bomb swung from a socialistic cobweb. Now the silence of political oblivion has fallen with a dull, sickening thud, and they are shaking in their boots with muffled ice and bated breath.

The party plank is a see-saw to catch votes. I stand upon this platform: I am in favor of making Hades the centre of the universe as it now is of the earth, and building a bridge over the Styx to New York, so that disappointed politicians and all others weary of life may here find refuge and a warm welcome.

I am in favor of fortifying the Styx, which would give Captain Kidd and his pirates a chance to swoop down on the commerce in New York Bay and get back to Hades unmolested. They could also form a combination with the chicken thieves of the African colony, and the supply of fowls brought across the river would establish for all time the pre-eminence of Hades as an all-the-year-’round resort.

WHEN IS WAGED THE BATTLE OF BALLOTS.

The Siftings is informed, on the best of authority, that an election is in progress. On his way to the office, the editor was buttonholed by a ward heeler and handed a pawned ticket. He was then conducted to a booth, where he retired—except for about three feet of trousers and two of leather. Having scratched to his heart’s content, he saw his ballot chewed by a stuffed box, and was permitted to go to his sanctum, there to forecast the outcome—a more uncertain quantity than the weather brewed in the department of the[Pg 138] interior. Our reporter says it’s all over but the shouting and he is shouting for Nero one minute and for Alexander the next. Personally, the editor is in doubt as to whom will be elected. Unfortunately for his peace of mind, he has heard the speeches of three of the candidates and has read the predictions of the chairmen of the different parties. One side or the other must be laboring under a “misapprehension.” Our attorney assures us that this phrase is perfectly safe. Having already two suits for libel on hand, we don’t feel like starting a clothing store to get rid of surplus suits. Misfit personalities always give the editor a libel suit. He needs a font of nonpareil with many daggers in it to keep off a minion of misunderstanding. Our attorney is Col. Robert G. Ingersoll. (See advertising columns.)

Alexander needs a few votes and Nero needs a lot and by the time they get through needing, there will be no votes left for anybody else. Louis XIV. has bolted his party and is running on an independent ticket. It is said that his name appears on the voting lists of all the wards; if so, he ought to be challenged. However, “Boss” Tweed, who is chairman of Nero’s campaign committee, may be confidentially expected to look out for his candidate’s interests—and his own.

Some say the dark horse will win, having the support of the tea party gang and of the Prince of Darkness. In this spirit-moving campaign[Pg 139] no one knows where the population is going to focus. The residence of a repeater is a mystery deeper than the fixed locale of a New York poolroom. After all, Hades is a good deal like the earth, where graveyards, forgetting the ethics of etiquette, yawn on election day to permit dead men to vote. Just as the paper goes to press, it is stated that pasters are being freely used and that 5,876,433 candidates have sprung up. The voting is still going on. If the polls close at the usual time, it is believed there would be about twenty small boys who had been overlooked in the voting, and these would kick as soon as they discovered they were not in the running.

We understand that in Hades woman has her rights, that she can exercise her franchise, yet not a single woman has voted to-day. It all goes to show that a woman desires only what she can’t get. She would rather use the ballots for curling papers or to trim her bonnet than to put into a stuffed box. But there’s another reason. According to the registration, not one woman in Hades is of votable age. None would acknowledge being more than “sweet and twenty!”

ELECTION EXTRA! LAST EDITION!

The battle of ballots is over. The last scratched ticket has been counted and the victor is—“Boss” Tweed! The New York politician, as Nero’s[Pg 140] manager, had charge of the distribution of tickets and pasted his own name over that of the Roman emperor. All’s fair in war and politics. Tweed deserves a tablet in the corridors of the hall of fame as well as the key to its front door!

LAST CHANCE TO COOL OFF!
Unsurpassed Funseeking

EXCURSION

To the Mirth-provoking Region of

EARTH

On Saturday, December 18.

(Next day Sunday, giving ample time to get back—also
to recover and look sober)

BASEBALL AT THE BATTERY.

The committee guarantees the game, not the quality of the playing. Umpire Shylock promises to make the score as close as his nature will permit. This is the line-up:

All that week Noah’s personally-conducted excursion to earth was the one topic of conversation. The Stygianites ceased to watch the thermometer and even forgot to stone the clerk of the weather bureau. It was the burning question of[Pg 145] the hour in Hades and smouldered for several days.

Two days after it had been posted, I joined the group reading the circular for the ’steenth time.

“Is Noah capable of being at the helm?” asked Napoleon. “His record indicates that all he knows could be printed on a postage stamp without cancelling the stamp.”

“He may be behind the times,” volunteered Methuselah, “but at least you must give Noah credit for knowing enough to come in out of the rain, which is more than could be said of most of the people of his day and generation.”

“To my knowledge,” quoth Alexander, “there are but two instances recorded of our good friend Populi going wrong; first, when he refused to follow Noah into the Ark before I was born; second, when he failed to elect yours truly as custodian of the keys to the hall of fame.”

“What mean the mystic letters ‘R. s. v. p.’?” asked Columbus, re-reading the circular.

“Being an Italian, you Ought to know Greek,” I rejoined, becoming first Ade to the injured Dooleyism, who didn’t Seem to get My Dust. Some Pagan Spaniards can’t see an American joke without Housetop Comment in Capital Letters. But I had gone Too Far to Ring Off, so I spoke in a Tone like an English check: “It’s a Foreign Phrase used by Americans in inviting People They Don’t Want. Translated into United States R. s. v. p. reads: Rush in; shake[Pg 146] hands; Victual up; Pull Out. Moral: Don’t be Inquisitive, for if I read History and the Zodiac aright, it’s a Cinch that you’ll have to hide your Elongated Flappers by Retreating to the Shadows of the Tall Cedars.”

“Revenons a nos moutons, redacteur,” protested Napoleon, who abhorred slang and preferred his followers and his fables without any morals. To be called an editor made me quite willing to come back to the subject—even reporters are susceptible to flattery.

“Anything that will distract one’s attention from the thermometer is welcome,” said young Lochinvar. “Can you wonder that a lover sighs like a furnace in this heated season when one sizzles by degrees? Alas! there are no summer girls in Hades, for they exist only in the shadow of an ice cream parlor. But I object to the company of Jonah on the excursion. He would hoodoo the whole trip and some of us wouldn’t get back to the Styx alive!”

“I wonder,” he said, “what Jonah’s mother-in-law said when he returned home and told that story of the whale as his excuse for remaining out three nights. Other men tell variations of the same story, but they make them less fishy.”

“By the bye,” I put in, “it seems to me the Morman has the biggest kick coming against his wives’ mothers, yet I’ve never heard a word[Pg 147] of complaint from any of them. How do you account for that, prophet?”

“Speaking from experience, I would say that one mother-in-law is quite enough to have in a family unless a man is fond of excitement,” answered Joe Smith.

“Boswell, what have I said on that subject,” asked Dr. Johnson. “I hate to repeat myself, but having said everything that’s worth saying, it’s up to Boswell.”

“If every Johnson had his Boswell, Washington might come into his own,” said that general. “But I suppose I ought to be satisfied, for am I not the father of my country?”

“You seem to think you are the father of the whole world,” snapped Adam, who was jealous of the American. “That distinction belonged to me when your country was still shrouded in the mists of the unknown. I have talked with all the historians and as far as I can learn, you are the father of no one and certainly not of your country. You aren’t even a Pilgrim Father and if all Americans followed in the footsteps of their first president, vital statistics would be less satisfactory to Roosevelt than they are. Now, when I was a boy—”

“Listen to the oldest inhabitant,” jeered Washington. “Adam recalls his boyhood days with extraordinary vividness for a man who never had any.”

“You may have been first at banquets and first in the hearts of your countrymen,” continued Adam, “but you weren’t first in the heart of your wife. As you married a widow, some man must have been ahead of you there.”

“Then there’s that old cherry tree fable which ought to have been uprooted from the school-books long ago,” said Ananias, who also had an axe to grind. “It’s unfortunate for the perpetuation of truthfulness that the only offspring of the father of his country is a chestnutty cherry tree, with a few chips lying on the ground.”

“You ought to give up being a pattern of veracity and take to writing fiction,” he said. “An historical novel by General Washington would be the Great American Novel which publishers have announced for the last hundred years and which many authors have thought themselves bald-headed trying to produce.”

“I understand that after the ball game, Tennyson will write ‘The Charge of the Eleven.’”

“Isn’t he wrong in his numeral? Baseball is a nine, which is somewhat of a discrepancy.”

“You cannot, even for a moment,” declared the Bard of Avon. “I allow no infringements on my copyright.”

“Don’t get excited,” returned milord. “All shades look alike to me and it would be a poor expert who couldn’t prove you were somebody else by your signature. Besides, who is Shakespeare anyway? The sweets of notoriety are not for you. You have never been interviewed, your picture does not figure in any patent-medicine advertisement, and no phonograph record repeats your blankety-blank verse without variation. Why, Bill, in these days you couldn’t pass an examination in Shakespeare without the assistance of half a dozen books of notes, a glossary, and five professors to tell you what you meant. To be the writer of a coon song is to be famous; to pen ‘Hamlet’ is simply to provide food for bookworms.”

“None of your fables for mine,” said Shakespeare, slangily. “You would designate two dogs; I would select two cats; they would call in a fox for the odd. The arbitrators would come to talk it over. I would smile and rub the cats’ fur the right way. You would fill the dogs with porterhouse steak rare, broiled till the air for miles around would be rich with the odor, and served with butter gravy. I would cram the cats with liver and cream. You would turn the fox loose in the chicken yard and give him the run of the goose pasture. Oh, I know how arbitrations are run, whether they be conducted by cats or by capital!”

“This is no occasion for petty jealousies,” remonstrated Izaak Walton. “I would rather cull flowers just now from the banks of a trout stream than train for a prize fight. Hip! hip! hip! for the Hippodrome! Have you forgotten that you are going to exchange Hades for New York, where you can pull the sky over you for cover, use the moon in place of an incandescent light, the four points of the compass for bed posts and a morning shower for an alarm clock? We are going to find rest near the heart of Nature, where bookmakers are unknown and politicians have no higher ambition than to sit on a rail fence and dream of whittling down the salaries of the school teachers when they get a place on the board of education.”

“Boss” Tweed smiled for the first time since his election as janitor of the hall of fame.

“Noah may have a map of the road to the millennium,” he said, “but he has gotten side-tracked if he thinks New York is one of the stations along that route!”

“WE’RE off,” sang out Noah, using a huge megaphone which could be heard throughout the length of the train. “Perhaps it was not necessary to tell you that we had started, but the megaphone man on all ‘Seeing New York’ trips is expected to begin his lecture with that observation, and as we’re going to the earth, we must do as mortals do.

“Due notice of our return will be published in the newspapers, but as our stay in the metropolis is indefinite, our address has been left with the constable, and the maid has been instructed to accept service.

“Speaking of maids reminds me that the dear women are rather hotter under their lace collars just now than usual and are saying things quite horrid. You see King Henry the Eighth insisted upon leaving the women at home. To this Cæsar was opposed.

“‘Your wife may be above suspicion,’ said Henry, ‘but I’m not so sure about mine. Six women tagging after a man are just about half a dozen too many.’

“Sir Walter Raleigh joined forces with Cæsar and they brought the matter to the attention of His Satanic Majesty. The metropolitan stores have just announced a bargain sale of dress goods, so Lucifer knew he would have an insurrection on his hands if he didn’t let the woman go shopping. You will notice that the ladies are with us.”

“If Lucifer had not been a fallen angel,” whispered King Henry in my ear, “he would not have known women so well!”

“Have you noticed the charming costume of Mother Eve, who is chaperoning the party?” asked Ward McAllister. “Her hat is made up of a little basket turned upside down, with trailing plants hanging from the top, kept from falling by a tangled mass of ribbon, tickled by a feather that like the ostrich from which it was taken, hides its head in a mound of lace and—but how can a mere man describe a woman’s bonnet adequately unless he has paid the bill for it? Adam says he would get a divorce if he could name anybody but a snake as co-respondent.”

“We are still in the region regarded as mythical by Robert Ingersoll,” went on Noah, “and I am pleased to say that that gentleman is returning to haunt the famous city which is assessed for one of our largest avenues paved with good intentions. This resolution business begins January[Pg 155] first with a bracing against booze and a curtailing of the smoke luxury, but it’s bones to nickels that it ends on the third day of grace with a general retreat all along the line and the devil in full pursuit. Most men proceed to lay a whole sidewalk before the grade is fixed.”

The train started up hill with a jolt, but disdaining to notice the inconvenience of his passengers—it was a personally-conducted tour,—the Grand Sir Knight of the Hand Car continued:

“This road is inclined to take you to your destination, and I trust the gravity of the situation appeals to you. Passengers are permitted to do one of three things: They may remain seated on the up grade provided they ply their fans vigorously enough to keep the engine from getting a hot box; or they may get out and walk up hill, or if they need exercise, they may get out and push. This is a free country where pull doesn’t count.

“We always look out for the comfort of our patrons. No passenger ever got a cinder in his eye from a locomotive on this road. Electricity is the motive power and it may interest the scientists present to learn that I have discovered the composition of electricity and with it the secret of life. Its power is derived from the action of its principal element, oxygen, in the process of uniting with the other element, hydrogen, with which it compounds in varying proportions up to seven parts by weight of oxygen to one of hydrogen, beyond which point the product becomes[Pg 156] water. Up on earth, they need coal or its equivalent to furnish power to produce electricity. Down here we make it from the decomposition of water and permitting the oxygen and the hydrogen to re-unite. As a result of this friction we get a fire many times hotter than that produced by coal, emitting oxygen instead of carbonic acid gas. That explains the exhilaration of the air of Hades and is one reason for its popularity as a health resort.

“No charge is ever made on this line for excessive baggage. You may carry as much as you please, provided you carry it yourself. The only live stock taken in the baggage cars are camels. These ‘water wagons’ might be useful if the assembled company gets dry before New York is reached, and if the train should break down, the camel can always be depended upon to get a hump on itself.

“The Stygian subway, ladies and gentlemen, is the greatest scenic route in the world—on a clear day. From the observation cars one gets a view of all that is to be seen—earth and darkness. This road is a great feat of engineering from the fact that it has no tunnels, no bridges and no curves. It is the only double tracked line in Hades and each rail is so widely separated from its fellow that they are not on speaking terms.

“A third rail was added for safety and rapid progress, movement having been the order of[Pg 157] things since the earth began to revolve upon its axis. It was found that a single track would not fit the rolling stock and an attempt to propel a two-wheel car over a single-rail road by Ananias provoked much cussing. The road-bed did not lie so well as the engineer who laid it!

“This is the only line in the world where the time-tables are made solely to suit the public and where a man never loses his train nor his temper. If the schedule as formulated by the general manager, Myself, does not suit you, application to the division superintendent, Myself, will be all that is necessary. Complaints to the general passenger, agent, Myself, are at once referred to Me in My capacity of president and thus no time is lost in red tape. I hold every office within the gift of the road, the only practical solution to labor difficulties.

“We are now nearing Hellgate, which is at the entrance to New York. Never having been to America, I asked Benedict Arnold to write the remainder of the lecture. You may therefore depend upon this description of the Great Republic as being strictly impartial and without prejudice. As an aside, I may as well tell you that before starting for New York, Arnold took the precaution to put an iron band around his pocketbook.

“America, according to the man who sold it, is the land where preachers are paid from $500[Pg 158] to $20,000 according to their ability to dodge Satan and tickle the ears of the wealthy; where no clergyman writes a sermon without a concordance in one hand and a popular novel in the other; where the deacons conduct an auction for the best pews, and where there is a daily round of theatricals by the Sunday School and chicken suppers by the Ladies’ Aid, with collections and religion thrown in for a change on Sunday.

“This is the land where the politician shakes poverty by the hand before election and later altogether; where they have a congress of four hundred men to make laws for a supreme court of nine to set aside; where they have prayers on the floor of the national capitol and whiskey in the basement; where men vote for what they do not want for fear they will get what they want by voting for it; where other men stay away from the polls one day and swear about the result the other three-hundred and sixty-four days in the year.

“American elections are held in the suicidal atmosphere of drear November, when the candidates roam about, seeking whom they can deceive. If saying what isn’t true so often that you end by believing it yourself, constitutes a liar, and if the lie is a sin to everybody but oneself, it is to be hoped the recording angel charitably shuts up his book and takes a vacation about election time. If one party could gain control of the whole earth, its leaders would start an[Pg 159] agitation to make their opponents go to the expense of fencing it in.

“The American press is nothing if not enterprising. Why, if King Edward were to fall downstairs tomorrow and break his meerschaum pipe, New Yorkers would know of it, through their newspapers, five hours before he knew it himself!

“Hades gets most of its paving material from the American metropolis, Apollyon having been given a perpetual contract by the Board of Aldermen. In New York there is such a multiplication of conveniences that an electrician, a telephone girl and a plumber have to occupy one’s flat day and night to keep things in order. It is the antithesis of Philadelphia and of Venice, whose streets are never torn up every second day for subways or to insert more pipes. So disgustingly peaceful is the Quaker City that one can lean out of the window in his pajamas and dip up water for the morning bath without waking up the policeman on the beat; all is so quiet along the Delaware to-night that no sticks of dynamite are piled on the front doorstep and no sky-scrapers are being erected between twilight and dawn to be demolished for something else as soon as the tenants have been elevated to the twentieth story.

“This is the land where the captain of industry is he whose pockets so bulge with other people’s money that the door of the prison is not large[Pg 160] enough to admit him; where the golden calf is worshipped as a god and the church is used as a waste-basket for unuttered prayers and for good resolutions, newly born; where to be virtuous is to be a crank, and to be honest is to be lonesome; where the citizens sit on the safety valve of conscience and throw wide open the throttle of energy; where the seat of intellect is in the stomach.

“The principal product of this remarkable country is girls, who tolerate rich papas only until they can buy a duke or a prince at the reigning market quotation. The American girl divides her attention between picture hats, chewing gum and ice cream sodas, beginning the day with an orange phosphate at ten A.M., and finishing it and the pocketbook of her steady company at twelve P.M. with a menu of soft-shell crabs, lobsters and Roman punch eaten without a qualm of conscience or a disordered stomach!

“America is a country where to look after the interests of capital is statesmanship and to do anything for labor is socialism and anarchy; where politicians before election orate upon the identity of interests of the capitalist who lives on The Avenue and the laborer who is kept in the back alley: a point which becomes so obscured the day after election as to require the help of the police and the militia to make clear. It is a youthful, boasting nation which forgets the[Pg 161] aphorism that children should be seen and not heard, whose every citizen holds a firecracker in one hand, a Fourth of July oration in the other and wears Declaration of Independence chips upon his shoulders in perpetual challenge to the world.

“America is a nation whose goddess of Liberty was foreign born, baptized in blood, then sent into exile, where, serene and indifferent, she turns her back on the land of her adoption and looks out to sea, a heartless statue! This is a country without a language of its own, with a national hymn that sings only of New England and is set to stolen music, whose only national dance is the cakewalk and most popular tune a rag-time coon song; a land whose people never allow the voice of conscience to speak louder than the bell of the cash register.”

“Despite his century of banishment, Benedict Arnold is still a traitor to his country,” I observed.

“Not at all,” answered Washington. “Why, he doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘traitor’ when separated from its Websterian environment. His so-called betrayal of his country was but an incident to his winning a woman, and where there’s a woman, man will make a way. Before the organization of the Asbestos Society of Sinners, the historians conspired with Pluto to fry us in our own fat, but now, immune in our asbestos attire, it’s Siberia[Pg 162] for Satan, and there’s always something doing in the Douma of the Dead. As for me, I’m tired of being called ‘truthful George’: it calls for such plain language that somebody’s feelings are sure to be singed. What’s the use of telling the truth when a lie is so much more believable and—interesting?”

Being busily engaged in writing a letter to the city editor of the New York Universe, I did not notice that the blare of the megaphone had ceased. It was not until the car shot out of the darkness that the letter dropped from my hand. I gasped in astonishment.

“The Battery! All change!” sang out the voice in the megaphone. But the car did not stop. As if shot from a catapult it leaped over the trees and vaulted the aquarium. It fluttered in the air and then settled down in the waters of the bay like a bird with a broken wing.

When I opened my eyes I was being rolled over a barrel, and an ambulance surgeon was forcing some very bad whiskey down my throat. Whether it was the liquor or the water I had swallowed I know not, but my surroundings seemed those of the Twenty-third Street water front, west, rather than of the Battery. Was I being rescued from the sinking of a ferry boat or from Noah’s Ark? Had my trip to Hades consumed only the flash of the grain of sand in Time’s hour-glass which had seen me sink to the bottom of the[Pg 163] river and rise again, or had I been the guest of the shades of the Styx for a day, a month, a year? A man who had taken a whiskey straight might have solved the problem, but to a man whose brain was befuddled by mixed drinks, coherent thought was impossible. I fell asleep, content to drift and drift and dream—of devils.

I have been to Hades in search of a sensation, but even the devil couldn’t keep a newspaper man down and so once more I am in the territory of the tired—New York. It may interest you to know that I am holding down the city desk of the Universe, the former incumbent having disappeared shortly before my return from the domain of the departed. He left a letter addressed to his successor and I feel that I am violating no confidence in divulging its contents:

“What impels me to record the experiences of this, my last night on earth, I do not know. Perhaps it is to counterfeit courage, for when a man receives a ‘ticket to the hereafter’ he feels the need of something to brace his backbone, just as a boy will whistle in make-believe bravery on rounding a dark corner.

“I felt more than ordinarily weary, for I seemed[Pg 168] to be losing my grip on my work and on—life! For several minutes I had been idly toying with a pearl-handled revolver which I used as a paper weight, when a rustling of paper made me turn. On the floor was a letter.

“‘That’s odd,’ I muttered. ‘The shades who deliver letters from our Stygian correspondent usually lay them upon my desk like any well-regulated ghost would do.’

“As I stooped to pick up the epistle, I noticed that my blue pencil lay upon my pen, the two forming a cross. Then I knew what had exorcised the shade and frightened it away. To an imaginative man, the episode was uncanny. And it was night!

“Using the penholder as a paper cutter, I tore open the envelope and took out the letter. It began without formalities:

“‘I suppose my interviews with Cimmerian citizens were pronounced the most sensational fakes of the year. Did you state whether the manuscript from the domain of the departed had a sulphurous tinge or was redolent with spices and perfumes? The wireless correspondence from Hades-on-Styx must have created much excitement on earth. People may doubt the genuineness of my description of Hades, but they will have a hot time proving me wrong, although nowadays not even the parson believes in a scorch for every sin. Don’t you want to come and take[Pg 169] my place as scribe to Satan? I have been fighting down a desire to have you visit this subterranean resort, for did one but express the wish, it would be gratified in this, the Land of Fulfilled Desire. If Pluto says “Come”—’

“Obeying a sudden impulse, I struck a match and held the letter in the flame. Instantly it was snatched from my hand, though I could see no one. At the same moment every electric light in the building went out, leaving the place in darkness. On the air was a pungent odor of brimstone.

“‘The devil!’ I ejaculated. That invocation sealed my fate: it was the Styx and the Simple Life for mine, via the Jersey ferry. And it was night!”

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Chapter.		Page.
I.	The Summons from Satan	3
II.	Shady Sinners of the Styx	15
III.	John Brown’s Body and the Bones of John Paul Jones	31
IV.	Henry the Eighth and His Harem in Hades	47
V.	What Methuselah Thinks of Dr. Osler	63
VI.	The Virgin Throned in the West: A Tabloid Tangle of Love and History	75
VII.	“Boss” Tweed on Tainted Money, With Some Nonsense Definitions of Fads and Finance	95
VIII.	How the Creation Centered About a Petticoat: A Revised Version of Darwin’s “Ascent of Man”	107
IX.	When Adam Was a Boy: Random Recollections of the Oldest Inhabitant	119
X.	Election Day Beyond The Styx	129
XI.	Noah’s Personally-Conducted Excursion to Earth	143
XII.	The Man With the Megaphone	153
	Epilogue. The Land of Fulfilled Desire	167