Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven




CHAPTER I



Well, when I had been dead about thirty years I begun to get a
little anxious. Mind you, had been whizzing through space all that
time, like a comet. LIKE a comet! Why, Peters, I laid over the
lot of them! Of course there warn't any of them going my way, as a
steady thing, you know, because they travel in a long circle like
the loop of a lasso, whereas I was pointed as straight as a dart
for the Hereafter; but I happened on one every now and then that
was going my way for an hour or so, and then we had a bit of a
brush together. But it was generally pretty one-sided, because I
sailed by them the same as if they were standing still. An
ordinary comet don't make more than about 200,000 miles a minute.
Of course when I came across one of that sort--like Encke's and
Halley's comets, for instance--it warn't anything but just a flash
and a vanish, you see. You couldn't rightly call it a race. It
was as if the comet was a gravel-train and I was a telegraph
despatch. But after I got outside of our astronomical system, I
used to flush a comet occasionally that was something LIKE. WE
haven't got any such comets--ours don't begin. One night I was
swinging along at a good round gait, everything taut and trim, and
the wind in my favor--I judged I was going about a million miles a
minute--it might have been more, it couldn't have been less--when I