him at the banquet. Of course that didn’t go for much THERE,
amongst all those big foreigners from other systems, as they hadn’t
heard of Shakespeare or Homer either, but it would amount to
considerable down there on our little earth if they could know
about it. I wish there was something in that miserable
spiritualism, so we could send them word. That Tennessee village
would set up a monument to Billings, then, and his autograph would
outsell Satan’s. Well, they had grand times at that reception – a
small-fry noble from Hoboken told me all about it – Sir Richard
Duffer, Baronet.”
“What, Sandy, a nobleman from Hoboken? How is that?”
“Easy enough. Duffer kept a sausage-shop and never saved a cent in
his life because he used to give all his spare meat to the poor, in
a quiet way. Not tramps, – no, the other sort – the sort that will
starve before they will beg – honest square people out of work.
Dick used to watch hungry-looking men and women and children, and
track them home, and find out all about them from the neighbors,
and then feed them and find them work. As nobody ever saw him give
anything to anybody, he had the reputation of being mean; he died
with it, too, and everybody said it was a good riddance; but the
minute he landed here, they made him a baronet, and the very first
words Dick the sausage-maker of Hoboken heard when he stepped upon
the heavenly shore were, ‘Welcome, Sir Richard Duffer!’ It
surprised him some, because he thought he had reasons to believe he
was pointed for a warmer climate than this one.”
All of a sudden the whole region fairly rocked under the crash of
eleven hundred and one thunder blasts, all let off at once, and
Sandy says, –
“There, that’s for the barkeep.”
I jumped up and says, –
“Then let’s be moving along, Sandy; we don’t want to miss any of
this thing, you know.”
“Keep your seat,” he says; “he is only just telegraphed, that is
all.”
“How?”
“That blast only means that he has been sighted from the signal-
station. He is off Sandy Hook. The committees will go down to
meet him, now, and escort him in. There will be ceremonies and
delays; they won’t he coming up the Bay for a considerable time,
yet. It is several billion miles away, anyway.”
“I could have been a barkeeper and a hard lot just as well as not,”
says I, remembering the lonesome way I arrived, and how there
wasn’t any committee nor anything.
“I notice some regret in your voice,” says Sandy, “and it is
natural enough; but let bygones be bygones; you went according to
your lights, and it is too late now to mend the thing.”
“No, let it slide, Sandy, I don’t mind. But you’ve got a Sandy
Hook HERE, too, have you?”
“We’ve got everything here, just as it is below. All the States
and Territories of the Union, and all the kingdoms of the earth and
the islands of the sea are laid out here just as they are on the
globe – all the same shape they are down there, and all graded to
the relative size, only each State and realm and island is a good
many billion times bigger here than it is below. There goes
another blast.”
“What is that one for?”
“That is only another fort answering the first one. They each fire
eleven hundred and one thunder blasts at a single dash – it is the
usual salute for an eleventh-hour guest; a hundred for each hour
and an extra one for the guest’s sex; if it was a woman we would
know it by their leaving off the extra gun.”
“How do we know there’s eleven hundred and one, Sandy, when they
all go off at once? – and yet we certainly do know.”
“Our intellects are a good deal sharpened up, here, in some ways,
and that is one of them. Numbers and sizes and distances are so
great, here, that we have to be made so we can FEEL them – our old