ways of counting and measuring and ciphering wouldn’t ever give us
an idea of them, but would only confuse us and oppress us and make
our heads ache.”
After some more talk about this, I says: “Sandy, I notice that I
hardly ever see a white angel; where I run across one white angel,
I strike as many as a hundred million copper-colored ones – people
that can’t speak English. How is that?”
“Well, you will find it the same in any State or Territory of the
American corner of heaven you choose to go to. I have shot along,
a whole week on a stretch, and gone millions and millions of miles,
through perfect swarms of angels, without ever seeing a single
white one, or hearing a word I could understand. You see, America
was occupied a billion years and more, by Injuns and Aztecs, and
that sort of folks, before a white man ever set his foot in it.
During the first three hundred years after Columbus’s discovery,
there wasn’t ever more than one good lecture audience of white
people, all put together, in America – I mean the whole thing,
British Possessions and all; in the beginning of our century there
were only 6,000,000 or 7,000,000 – say seven; 12,000,000 or
14,000,000 in 1825; say 23,000,000 in 1850; 40,000,000 in 1875.
Our death-rate has always been 20 in 1000 per annum. Well, 140,000
died the first year of the century; 280,000 the twenty-fifth year;
500,000 the fiftieth year; about a million the seventy-fifth year.
Now I am going to be liberal about this thing, and consider that
fifty million whites have died in America from the beginning up to
to-day – make it sixty, if you want to; make it a hundred million –
it’s no difference about a few millions one way or t’other. Well,
now, you can see, yourself, that when you come to spread a little
dab of people like that over these hundreds of billions of miles of
American territory here in heaven, it is like scattering a ten-cent
box of homoeopathic pills over the Great Sahara and expecting to
find them again. You can’t expect us to amount to anything in
heaven, and we DON’T – now that is the simple fact, and we have got
to do the best we can with it. The learned men from other planets
and other systems come here and hang around a while, when they are
touring around the Kingdom, and then go back to their own section
of heaven and write a book of travels, and they give America about
five lines in it. And what do they say about us? They say this
wilderness is populated with a scattering few hundred thousand
billions of red angels, with now and then a curiously complected
DISEASED one. You see, they think we whites and the occasional
nigger are Injuns that have been bleached out or blackened by some
leprous disease or other – for some peculiarly rascally SIN, mind
you. It is a mighty sour pill for us all, my friend – even the
modestest of us, let alone the other kind, that think they are
going to be received like a long-lost government bond, and hug
Abraham into the bargain. I haven’t asked you any of the
particulars, Captain, but I judge it goes without saying – if my
experience is worth anything – that there wasn’t much of a hooraw
made over you when you arrived – now was there?”
“Don’t mention it, Sandy,” says I, coloring up a little; “I
wouldn’t have had the family see it for any amount you are a mind
to name. Change the subject, Sandy, change the subject.”
“Well, do you think of settling in the California department of
bliss?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t calculating on doing anything really
definite in that direction till the family come. I thought I would
just look around, meantime, in a quiet way, and make up my mind.
Besides, I know a good many dead people, and I was calculating to
hunt them up and swap a little gossip with them about friends, and
old times, and one thing or another, and ask them how they like it