Usually they would talk only about themselves; they would n't even recognize the existence of other souls. They were not more egotistic than they had been in the material world, but now there was no false shame about it, and it was carried to extremes for which even forty years of growing contempt for the human race found me unprepared.

I remember, for instance, how the lady who was blown wildly for what had seemed to her, poor dear, a year between Forty-fifth and Forty-second streets would keep on insisting that such a thing had never happened to any soul before. I sympathized with her for the uncomfortable time she had had; but, no, that was n't enough. She kept at it till I bettered her by saying that, quite obviously, such a thing never could happen to any soul again. Then she was satisfied.

There were exceptions. There was the Rev. Mr. Evan Thomas. It was from him, indeed, that I gathered most information, by his help that I was able to grasp at last what really was happening to them all in this future life.

I found the soul of this once popular preacher on a September night wedged in the shutters of a candy shop. I dug him out, and he thanked me. He was about seven inches long by three broad, quite straight down one side, but with undulary indentations upon the other; of no thickness to speak of, with rather a rubbery. surface, and in color a sort of bluish gray. It was a fine night. The harsh gust of wind that had wedged him in the shutter had died down, and we had a long and pleasant chat.

He spoke with equal ease and cheerfulness about his past life and his present death. Was this state of things the heaven he had spent much time and energy preaching about? No; on the whole he did n't think it was. But in that case had his soul (I had to put this delicately) and the thousands upon thousands of other souls besides that we knew were drifting up and down-had they taken, so to speak, the wrong turning? No, he did n't exactly think that either. I must remem

ber, of course, that he had not been dead long. I must also remember that for many years now the world or, at any rate, that part of it that lived and moved on Fifth Avenue had ceased to believe in hell. Now, people cannot possibly go to a place they don't believe in; that stands to reason. And he quoted me a line from the Acts about the man who died and went to his own place. That had furnished him, he thought, with a solution of the question.

"When I first died," he told me, "and found myself floating lightly about here, I will own that I was puzzled and even, though I had and still have every faith in God's goodness, a little disappointed. It was true that in the exercise of my calling I had refrained from painting any very definite picture of the state of bliss to which the souls of the righteous should be called. My own congregation was certainly not the sort to permit me to indulge in any highly colored or romantic vision of that future. They were well educated, practical people. Besides, as far as I could see, the use that they did already make of their imagination was very questionable. To say that they used it merely as a stimulus to erotic frivolities would perhaps have been too harsh, though I have at times been tempted to put my complaint in so many words. But what they needed from me surely was sobering, commonplace morality. Still, let me confess that when it actually came to entering upon a more blessed existence, I had in my secret heart looked forward to something in the nature of a pleasant little surprise. And to find myself drifting-"

"Still drifting," I said rather wickedly.

He was not to be checked by any mere witticism. "Drifting," he went on, "and, for all I knew, drifting for an eternity up and down Fifth Avenue, was disappointing.

"But I reflected. As a rational Christian I was eager to assure myself of God's laws and then to square them, if possible, with the exigencies of any world in which it might please Him to place me. And I have always been ready, nay, anxious, to search out my own faults and, if necessary,

to repent of them. So in the course of much drifting and some whirling, often round the very steeple that pointed to heaven from above the pulpit of my late labors, I disinterestedly reviewed my former existence and gathered it up, so to say, as even the longest life may be gathered, into a dozen sentences. See, now, if they do not give you the key to this mystery.

"I remembered my call from a sphere of popular eloquence in England to the church that-well, it can hardly be said to ornament Fifth Avenue, but it is a pleasant, comfortable church. I knew nothing of America at that time, but I had heard stories of the luxury of New York women and of financial corruption among the men, and when the flattering offer came I naturally asked myself whether God had not summoned me to scarify, though lovingly, these highly placed sinners, to bring them to repentance and a more humble following in the footsteps of their Lord. I settled, if possible, to turn a surplus of the enormous stipend they were to give me into a trust fund for some sensible and suitable charity-"

I looked. We were opposite the very church.

"Is the stipend so big?" I asked, and nodded across.

"When it came to the point," he said, "I found it not big enough. I had a grown-up son and daughters. They had, of course, to mix on terms of equality with my congregation. We had to keep up appearances; the lay patrons of the church expected it. Still, we were never seriously in debt.

"To continue-"

"Please!" I begged him. I was enjoying it. He had evidently been a preacher of some style.

"My congregation at once impressed me as being made up of charming people, kindly, clever, and hospitable, boundlessly hospitable. We spent several weeks, my wife and I, or my eldest daughter and I, night after night, dining with the chief families among them. One should always accept such invitations; one should view the home life of one's flock. And while

I was sampling them, sizing them up, determining by personal and unprejudiced observation upon which most prevalent vice or failing the sword of my spiritual. condemnation should first fall, I merely preached week by week, not to be rash, not to be unfair, sermons upon less disputable subjects-sermons that purposely avoided any vital thrusts into that body. politic to which I was now the chosen minister.

"They were admirable to preach to; quick to seize on a point, ever ready for those little sub-humorous sallies which are the salt of a sermon, the delight of a preacher who can discreetly indulge in them. One could not hold their attention long, it is true, but it was keen while it lasted. They liked to have their intelligence appealed to; they welcomed my references to the very latest things in science and literature. I projected a series of sermons in which I purposed to take Sunday by Sunday the works of some famous skeptical philosopher and endeavor to reconcile them with Christian ethics. Such a course would not have been possible in England, where, I confess, the indifference of congregations to my very extensive modern reading and the quotations I could make from it had often nettled me exceedingly. But these New-Yorkers I did find, to use a vulgar phrase, to be both mentally and spiritually a thoroughly up-to-date crowd.

"Not, mind you, that I had weakened in my resolve to scarify them, when need were and opportunity came, for their deeper sins. But I had found that they were not children, they were not fools, that the thing needed doing well, and from the point of view of a thorough understanding of the very peculiar circumstances under which fashionable life must be lived here; otherwise it had better be left alone altogether. That thorough understanding I set myself conscientiously to acquire.

"But, dear me!" he broke off, "my twelve sentences have been much exceeded. Old habits! And about myself! It is inexcusable." Again I begged him to continue. Quite cheerfully he did.

"I found many difficulties in my way. Society women undoubtedly did indulge in outrageous luxury, but the worst offenders did not come to my church, and to berate them in their absence would merely have given undeserved satisfaction. to the women who did come and were themselves by no means innocent in the matter. That is a danger in preaching. Your congregation will always imagine that you are, as one says, getting at their neighbors and not at them. I did make a most strenuous effort, though, to tackle the question of financial corruption. I worked at it for weeks; but it was a very difficult subject, involving a great complication of figures-at which, indeed, I was never good-as well as several tricky. points of difference between state and federal law which it really needed an expert to solve. But I could not, above all things, risk exposing my ignorance. That would have done more harm than good. The habit that newspapers in this country have of reporting sermons flatters, it is true, but also intimidates. In the end, to my lasting regret, I felt compelled to abandon the idea.

"I remember I made one attempt to deal with the simple sin of overeating, of which quite seventy per cent. of my congregation were without doubt guilty. I hung the constructive part of the sermon upon the subject of food reform, a very popular one just then; but the destructive part had to be too delicately done to make a real effect. It had to be; for had I not myself fed and fed well at most of their tables? And in the flesh I was a little inclined to stoutness.

"And so after a while I found that I slipped into preaching to my congregation only such sermons as my congregation as my congregation wanted to hear. What else was to be done? They would not otherwise have come to hear me at all, for there is no law to make them, and nowadays precious little public opinion. I should have lost any chance at all of doing good. As it was, by contriving at any cost to be interesting, my church was kept full, and, starting ostensibly from strange and far

away subjects, wars with the heathen, Greek legends, or the latest good novel, I never failed, I think, in the end to bring my hearers, though at the time they might hardly be aware of it, one small step nearer to Jesus. It is true that a really strong man in my place might have done better before they turned him out. All I can say is that I did the best that was in But looking back, I see quite clearly now what happened. I had set out to convert Fifth Avenue; it was Fifth Avenue converted me.

me.

"And that, my dear sir, is why, though disembodied, I am still here, and why we are all here, poor souls. In our lifetime this, at its best, was all we strove toward, and in our death we have come 'to our own place.'

He ceased. His shape had all the time been lying comfortably along my left forearm. I looked up from it to where, in the air above me, the river of souls flowed ceaselessly on. It was a still night now. I could never make out why, since they had absolutely no personal power of volition, some always got along faster than others. On an average they seemed to make about three miles an hour. It was a wonderfully weary sight.

"Who are they, generally speaking?" I asked.

"Well," said the preacher's soul, "it's a most curious mixture. There are the tip-top people who used to belong here. and never thought there was any further to get; and then there are all the people who badly wanted to get here in their lifetimes and never could."

"I take it that the two sorts don't mix well," I said.

"There again," he went on, "it does n't work out as you'd expect. We 're all here now because we belong here. There's no escape; and, as we can't control our movements, we 've no power now of associating with one lot of souls more than with another. The wind bloweth us where it listeth. So the consequence is that we don't worry much about our behavior; and the people who are rude by nature are just rude to everybody, and the

snobs are snobbish and the cads caddish and the bullies bully and the gentle folk are gentle without any respect of persons. Nothing else is expected of us. It makes a simple world of it."

"Is there no escape, do you say?" I

asked.

"I don't see how there can be," he said rather plaintively. "In the last world you could, what is called, 'make something' of yourself. You could choose your profestion and your friends, you could do right or wrong. You could deny your Lord or act up to your faith."

"Could you always?" I argued.

"Circumstances handicap one shockingly. We mean to do better than we ever can. My friend," said he, "your faith is the thing you do act up to.

"That's what we have discovered here. God makes no excuses. The pious opinions you hold have no more effect on the soul than a knowledge of the multiplication table."

"But don't you desire to escape now ? How about the effect of that?" I pressed him.

For a little he did not answer; I waited patiently. I have forgotten to remark how soon I had found that for talking to a soul the human voice is a clumsy and unnecessary instrument. One could imagine (I did at first) that the shapes emitted queer little sounds, but I cannot see how that actually could be. I believe that one only instinctively clothed the impressions they conveyed direct to one's mind in the tones of a human voice, and with a very little practice one did not need to do that at all. One could communicate with extraordinary swiftness and ease by imagination alone, talk soul to soul, as it were. It is a simple trick, can be practised between human beings while on earth, and is indeed the best form of conversation.

After the moment of silence the soul of the reverend gentleman sighed.

"No," he said, "I cannot honestly say that I want to escape, for I cannot muster up a belief that there is anything much else to escape to. All the effort I was capable of in that direction I made in my

former life. And I am useful here. I really think I am. Our Lord, you will remember, ministered to the spirits in prison. Whenever I am blown against another soul, whenever the wind gathers two or three of us together, I take up the tale of salvation as I used to do on earth. Those, if I chance to hit upon them, who were accustomed to hear me in that church opposite are a little bored by it, perhaps, for naturally I have nothing new to say. But to the others, to those who had to content themselves on their earthly pilgrimage with nothing but the ideal of Fifth Avenue, and with more commonplace spiritual ministrations to them, I do think that the word of truth, as I am inspired to speak it, is a comfort, though of course it cannot now get them on any further. Yet if it consoles them in their present stationwell, that is one of the main functions of religion, is it not?"

"But to endure this sort of thing through an eternity?" I said.

"My dear young man," he patronized me, "time is an illusion. I remember so well making this point in one of my most characteristic discourses. Time is what we think it; a minute of agony is an age, a year of happiness is a minute. Does n't it strike you that an eternity of boredom may perhaps have no extreme meaning to those who, after all, have spent most of their time in being bored? You cannot measure emptiness, and eternity is only the emptiness of time.

"Had n't you better let me fly now," he added, "and go home? It will be daylight soon, and from what you tell me you have n't been to bed for nights."

I took his soul between my finger and thumb.

"I am exceedingly grateful to you," I said. "You have thrown light on what was puzzling me much. Do you think we shall meet again?"