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.’

Chapter 49 Episodes in Pilot Life

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.