A. (After long hesitation and many throes and spasms.)
Natural death.
This ended the interview. My friend told the
medium that when his relative was in this poor world,
he was endowed with an extraordinary intellect and
an absolutely defectless memory, and it seemed a great
pity that he had not been allowed to keep some shred
of these for his amusement in the realms of everlasting
contentment, and for the amazement and admiration
of the rest of the population there.
This man had plenty of clients—has plenty
yet. He receives letters from spirits located
in every part of the spirit world, and delivers them
all over this country through the United States mail.
These letters are filled with advice—advice
from ‘spirits’ who don’t know as
much as a tadpole—and this advice is religiously
followed by the receivers. One of these clients
was a man whom the spirits (if one may thus plurally
describe the ingenious Manchester) were teaching how
to contrive an improved railway car-wheel. It
is coarse employment for a spirit, but it is higher
and wholesomer activity than talking for ever about
‘how happy we are.’
In the course of the tug-boat gossip, it came
out that out of every five of my former friends who
had quitted the river, four had chosen farming as
an occupation. Of course this was not because
they were peculiarly gifted, agriculturally, and thus
more likely to succeed as farmers than in other industries:
the reason for their choice must be traced to some
other source. Doubtless they chose farming because
that life is private and secluded from irruptions
of undesirable strangers—like the pilot-house
hermitage. And doubtless they also chose it because
on a thousand nights of black storm and danger they
had noted the twinkling lights of solitary farm-houses,
as the boat swung by, and pictured to themselves the
serenity and security and coziness of such refuges
at such times, and so had by-and-bye come to dream
of that retired and peaceful life as the one desirable
thing to long for, anticipate, earn, and at last enjoy.
But I did not learn that any of these pilot-farmers
had astonished anybody with their successes.
Their farms do not support them: they support
their farms. The pilot-farmer disappears from
the river annually, about the breaking of spring,
and is seen no more till next frost. Then he
appears again, in damaged homespun, combs the hayseed
out of his hair, and takes a pilot-house berth for
the winter. In this way he pays the debts which
his farming has achieved during the agricultural season.
So his river bondage is but half broken; he is still
the river’s slave the hardest half of the year.
One of these men bought a farm, but did not retire
to it. He knew a trick worth two of that.
He did not propose to pauperize his farm by applying
his personal ignorance to working it. No, he put
the farm into the hands of an agricultural expert
to be worked on shares—out of every three
loads of corn the expert to have two and the pilot
the third. But at the end of the season the pilot
received no corn. The expert explained that his
share was not reached. The farm produced only
two loads.
