"Well, there's England, Sandy--the English district of heaven."

"Yes, but it is not so very much better than this end of the
heavenly domain. As long as you run across Englishmen born this
side of three hundred years ago, you are all right; but the minute
you get back of Elizabeth's time the language begins to fog up, and
the further back you go the foggier it gets. I had some talk with
one Langland and a man by the name of Chaucer--old-time poets--but
it was no use, I couldn't quite understand them, and they couldn't
quite understand me. I have had letters from them since, but it is
such broken English I can't make it out. Back of those men's time
the English are just simply foreigners, nothing more, nothing less;
they talk Danish, German, Norman French, and sometimes a mixture of
all three; back of THEM, they talk Latin, and ancient British,
Irish, and Gaelic; and then back of these come billions and
billions of pure savages that talk a gibberish that Satan himself
couldn't understand. The fact is, where you strike one man in the
English settlements that you can understand, you wade through awful
swarms that talk something you can't make head nor tail of. You
see, every country on earth has been overlaid so often, in the
course of a billion years, with different kinds of people and
different sorts of languages, that this sort of mongrel business
was bound to be the result in heaven."

"Sandy," says I, "did you see a good many of the great people
history tells about?"

"Yes--plenty. I saw kings and all sorts of distinguished people."