for a man to be buried. This isn't such a good job, after all, this
world, sir, you must allow."

"Neither is that coffin," said I, as if by a sudden inspiration.

The man seemed taken aback, as Old Rogers might have said. He looked
at the coffin and then looked at me.

"Well, sir," he said, after a short pause, which no doubt seemed
longer both to him and to me than it would have seemed to any third
person, "I don't see anything amiss with the coffin. I don't say
it'll last till doomsday, as the gravedigger says to Hamlet, because
I don't know so much about doomsday as some people pretend to; but
you see, sir, it's not finished yet."

"Thank you," I said; "that's just what I meant. You thought I was
hasty in my judgment of your coffin; whereas I only said of it
knowingly what you said of the world thoughtlessly. How do you know
that the world is finished anymore than your coffin? And how dare
you then say that it is a bad job?"

The same respectfully scornful smile passed over his face, as much
as to say, "Ah! it's your trade to talk that way, so I must not be
too hard upon you."

"At any rate, sir," he said, "whoever made it has taken long enough
about it, a person would think, to finish anything he ever meant to
finish."

"One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years