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

"No, let it slide, Sandy, I don’t mind. But you’ve got a Sandy
Hook HERE, too, have you?"
"We’ve got everything here, just as it is below. All the States
and Territories of the Union, and all the kingdoms of the earth and
the islands of the sea are laid out here just as they are on the
globe--all the same shape they are down there, and all graded to
the relative size, only each State and realm and island is a good
many billion times bigger here than it is below. There goes
another blast."
"What is that one for?"
"That is only another fort answering the first one. They each fire
eleven hundred and one thunder blasts at a single dash--it is the
usual salute for an eleventh-hour guest; a hundred for each hour
and an extra one for the guest’s sex; if it was a woman we would
know it by their leaving off the extra gun."
"How do we know there’s eleven hundred and one, Sandy, when they
all go off at once?--and yet we certainly do know."
"Our intellects are a good deal sharpened up, here, in some ways,
and that is one of them. Numbers and sizes and distances are so
great, here, that we have to be made so we can FEEL them--our old
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?"


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.