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."