Poor Will Thackeray! he finds the same dross in the gold, the same animalculae in the water, the same poison in the air, the same fact that men are not gods in that much-vaunted place called heaven, as on the much-abused earth.  But he wipes his spectacles, and clears away the mist of speculation and fancy, which has bedimmed his eyes, and looks about him more hopefully and trustfully than in the days when he walked through Vanity Fair and saw how Mr. Timms, with not a penny in the bank, pinched himself to give a little dinner in imitation of a great lord who gave a great dinner, and had gold beyond his count; snobs, who wore paste jewels and cotton-backed velvet, who cursed a fellow and strutted about in imitation of noble lords, who wore real diamonds and silken velvets! mimicking the follies of the great, but never their noble deeds and heroisms.

He is beyond snobs now.  He is in the land of heroisms and heroes.  Yet he feels he has been cheated by the fat parson who stole sovereigns from his pocket to keep him out of h——!  His spiritual bones fairly ache with the leagues he has travelled, hunting up the throne of God!  “Where the deuce,” he mutters, “is the showman?” He can’t find the lake of fire and brimstone without a guide.

Poor Thackeray! he again wipes his spectacles and feels he has been sold!  This life on the other side of Jordan he finds to be what his American cousins would call a “humbug,” a downright swindle upon the sympathies and good taste of those who wear long streamers of crape, and groan and sob over his funeral rites!  He feels in duty bound (out of consideration for those mourners who expect nothing else) to go scudding through the air in a loose white shroud, or to rest cosily housed away in the “bosom of his Maker,” like a big, grown-up infant that he is, or else to be howling at the top of his lungs hallelujahs!—­he that could never raise a note.  And, if not so, certainly, out of compliment to the judgment of his boon companions, he should be engaged in the dread alternative of sitting astride a pair of balances and being “weighed and found wanting;” or having been sent by the relentless Judge into everlasting torment “where there is cursing and gnashing of teeth,” he should be found there tormenting his fellow-imps!

But alas! to his mortification, nothing of the kind is occurring or seems likely to occur.

He has been as active as the next man since his arrival in ghostdom.  He has peeped under the chapeaux of every solemn pilgrim whom he has passed, but failed to find the four-and-twenty elders who have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb.  What has he found?  He really is ashamed to own up to the number of mountain sides and sloping hills he has inspected in the vain search for a place he used to call h——­ (he thought it blasphemy to add the other three letters); but neither cloven foot, nor forked tail, nor horns, nor any kind of fearful person in black, has pounced upon him; nor has he been seized by any claimant for leaving the world unshriven, as he did.