to have a sociable improving-time discussing winds, and currents
and variations of compass with an undertaker?”
“I get your idea, Sandy. He couldn’t interest me. He would be an
ignoramus in such things – he would bore me, and I would bore him.”
“You have got it. You would bore the patriarchs when you talked,
and when they talked they would shoot over your head. By and by
you would say, ‘Good morning, your Eminence, I will call again’ –
but you wouldn’t. Did you ever ask the slush-boy to come up in the
cabin and take dinner with you?”
“I get your drift again, Sandy. I wouldn’t be used to such grand
people as the patriarchs and prophets, and I would be sheepish and
tongue-tied in their company, and mighty glad to get out of it.
Sandy, which is the highest rank, patriarch or prophet?”
“Oh, the prophets hold over the patriarchs. The newest prophet,
even, is of a sight more consequence than the oldest patriarch.
Yes, sir, Adam himself has to walk behind Shakespeare.”
“Was Shakespeare a prophet?”
“Of course he was; and so was Homer, and heaps more. But
Shakespeare and the rest have to walk behind a common tailor from
Tennessee, by the name of Billings; and behind a horse-doctor named
Sakka, from Afghanistan. Jeremiah, and Billings and Buddha walk
together, side by side, right behind a crowd from planets not in
our astronomy; next come a dozen or two from Jupiter and other
worlds; next come Daniel, and Sakka and Confucius; next a lot from
systems outside of ours; next come Ezekiel, and Mahomet, Zoroaster,
and a knife-grinder from ancient Egypt; then there is a long
string, and after them, away down toward the bottom, come
Shakespeare and Homer, and a shoemaker named Marais, from the back
settlements of France.”
“Have they really rung in Mahomet and all those other heathens?”
“Yes – they all had their message, and they all get their reward.
The man who don’t get his reward on earth, needn’t bother – he will
get it here, sure.”
“But why did they throw off on Shakespeare, that way, and put him
away down there below those shoe-makers and horse-doctors and
knife-grinders – a lot of people nobody ever heard of?”
“That is the heavenly justice of it – they warn’t rewarded
according to their deserts, on earth, but here they get their
rightful rank. That tailor Billings, from Tennessee, wrote poetry
that Homer and Shakespeare couldn’t begin to come up to; but nobody
would print it, nobody read it but his neighbors, an ignorant lot,
and they laughed at it. Whenever the village had a drunken frolic
and a dance, they would drag him in and crown him with cabbage
leaves, and pretend to bow down to him; and one night when he was
sick and nearly starved to death, they had him out and crowned him,
and then they rode him on a rail about the village, and everybody
followed along, beating tin pans and yelling. Well, he died before
morning. He wasn’t ever expecting to go to heaven, much less that
there was going to be any fuss made over him, so I reckon he was a
good deal surprised when the reception broke on him.”
“Was you there, Sandy?”
“Bless you, no!”
“Why? Didn’t you know it was going to come off?”
“Well, I judge I did. It was the talk of these realms – not for a
day, like this barkeeper business, but for twenty years before the
man died.”
“Why the mischief didn’t you go, then?”
“Now how you talk! The like of me go meddling around at the
reception of a prophet? A mudsill like me trying to push in and
help receive an awful grandee like Edward J. Billings? Why, I
should have been laughed at for a billion miles around. I
shouldn’t ever heard the last of it.”
“Well, who did go, then?”
“Mighty few people that you and I will ever get a chance to see,
Captain. Not a solitary commoner ever has the luck to see a
reception of a prophet, I can tell you. All the nobility, and all
the patriarchs and prophets – every last one of them – and all the