little corner of heaven, except by a few very learned men scattered here and there—­and they always spell their names wrong, and get the performances of one mixed up with the doings of another, and they almost always locate them simply in our solar system, and think that is enough without going into little details such as naming the particular world they are from.  It is like a learned Hindoo showing off how much he knows by saying Longfellow lives in the United States—­as if he lived all over the United States, and as if the country was so small you couldn’t throw a brick there without hitting him.  Between you and me, it does gravel me, the cool way people from those monster worlds outside our system snub our little world, and even our system.  Of course we think a good deal of Jupiter, because our world is only a potato to it, for size; but then there are worlds in other systems that Jupiter isn’t even a mustard-seed to—­like the planet Goobra, for instance, which you couldn’t squeeze inside the orbit of Halley’s comet without straining the rivets.  Tourists from Goobra (I mean parties that lived and died there—­natives) come here, now and then, and inquire about our world, and when they find out it is so little that a streak of lightning can flash clear around it in the eighth of a second, they have to lean up against something to laugh.  Then they screw a glass into their eye and go to examining us, as if we were a curious kind of foreign bug, or something of that sort.  One of them asked me how long our day was; and when I told him it was twelve hours long, as a general thing, he asked me if people where I was from considered it worth while to get up and wash for such a day as that.  That is the way with those Goobra people—­they can’t seem to let a chance go by to throw it in your face that their day is three hundred and twenty-two of our years long.  This young snob was just of age—­he was six or seven thousand of his days old—­say two million of our years—­and he had all the puppy airs that belong to that time of life—­that turning-point when a person has got over being a boy and yet ain’t quite a man exactly.  If it had been anywhere else but in heaven, I would have given him a piece of my mind.  Well, anyway, Billings had the grandest reception that has been seen in thousands of centuries, and I think it will have a good effect.  His name will be carried pretty far, and it will make our system talked about, and maybe our world, too, and raise us in the respect of the general public of heaven.  Why, look here—­Shakespeare walked backwards before that tailor from Tennessee, and scattered flowers for him to walk on, and Homer stood behind his chair and waited on 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.”