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 here, as far as they have got.  I reckon my wife will want to camp in the California range, though, because most all her departed will be there, and she likes to be with folks she knows.”

“Don’t you let her.  You see what the Jersey district of heaven is, for whites; well, the Californian district is a thousand times worse.  It swarms with a mean kind of leather-headed mud-colored angels—­and your nearest white neighbor is likely to be a million miles away.  What A man mostly misses, in heaven, is company—­ company of his own sort and color and language.  I have come near settling in the European part of heaven once or twice on that account.”

“Well, why didn’t you, Sandy?”

“Oh, various reasons.  For one thing, although you see plenty of whites there, you can’t understand any of them, hardly, and so you go about as hungry for talk as you do here.  I like to look at a Russian or a German or an Italian—­I even like to look at a Frenchman if I ever have the luck to catch him engaged in anything that ain’t indelicate—­but looking don’t cure the hunger—­what you want is talk.”

“Well, there’s England, Sandy—­the English district of heaven.”

“Yes, but it is not so very much better than this end of the heavenly domain.  As long as you run across Englishmen born this side of three hundred years ago, you are all right; but the minute you get back of Elizabeth’s time the language begins to fog up, and the further back you go the foggier it gets.  I had some talk with one Langland and a man by the name of Chaucer—­old-time poets—­but it was no use, I couldn’t quite understand them, and they couldn’t quite