used to surprise me--this fact that everybody went to heaven.
Thinking of all the people that had died, I pictured the place
overcrowded. Almost I felt sorry for the Devil, nobody ever coming
his way, so to speak. I saw him in imagination, a lonely old
gentleman, sitting at his gate day after day, hoping against hope,
muttering to himself maybe that it hardly seemed worth while, from
his point of view, keeping the show open. An old nurse whom I once
took into my confidence was sure, if I continued talking in this sort
of way, that he would get me anyhow. I must have been an evil-
hearted youngster. The thought of how he would welcome me, the only
human being that he had seen for years, had a certain fascination for
me; for once in my existence I should be made a fuss about.

At every public meeting the chief speaker is always "a jolly good
fellow." The man from Mars, reading our newspapers, would be
convinced that every Member of Parliament was a jovial, kindly, high-
hearted, generous-souled saint, with just sufficient humanity in him
to prevent the angels from carrying him off bodily. Do not the
entire audience, moved by one common impulse, declare him three times
running, and in stentorian voice, to be this "jolly good fellow"? So
say all of them. We have always listened with the most intense
pleasure to the brilliant speech of our friend who has just sat down.
When you thought we were yawning, we were drinking in his eloquence,
open-mouthed.

The higher one ascends in the social scale, the wider becomes this
necessary base of make-believe. When anything sad happens to a very
big person, the lesser people round about him hardly care to go on
living. Seeing that the world is somewhat overstocked with persons
of importance, and that something or another generally is happening