“But why did they throw off on Shakespeare, that way, and put him away down there below those shoe-makers and horse-doctors and knife-grinders—­a lot of people nobody ever heard of?”

“That is the heavenly justice of it—­they warn’t rewarded according to their deserts, on earth, but here they get their rightful rank.  That tailor Billings, from Tennessee, wrote poetry that Homer and Shakespeare couldn’t begin to come up to; but nobody would print it, nobody read it but his neighbors, an ignorant lot, and they laughed at it.  Whenever the village had a drunken frolic and a dance, they would drag him in and crown him with cabbage leaves, and pretend to bow down to him; and one night when he was sick and nearly starved to death, they had him out and crowned him, and then they rode him on a rail about the village, and everybody followed along, beating tin pans and yelling.  Well, he died before morning.  He wasn’t ever expecting to go to heaven, much less that there was going to be any fuss made over him, so I reckon he was a good deal surprised when the reception broke on him.”

“Was you there, Sandy?”

“Bless you, no!”

“Why?  Didn’t you know it was going to come off?”

“Well, I judge I did.  It was the talk of these realms—­not for a day, like this barkeeper business, but for twenty years before the man died.”

“Why the mischief didn’t you go, then?”

“Now how you talk!  The like of me go meddling around at the reception of a prophet?  A mudsill like me trying to push in and help receive an awful grandee like Edward J. Billings?  Why, I should have been laughed at for a billion miles around.  I shouldn’t ever heard the last of it.”

“Well, who did go, then?”

“Mighty few people that you and I will ever get a chance to see, Captain.  Not a solitary commoner ever has the luck to see a reception of a prophet, I can tell you.  All the nobility, and all the patriarchs and prophets—­every last one of them—­and all the archangels, and all the princes and governors and viceroys, were there,—­and no small fry—­not a single one.  And mind you, I’m not talking about only the grandees from our world, but the princes and patriarchs and so on from all the worlds that shine in our sky, and from billions more that belong in systems upon systems away outside of the one our sun is in.  There were some prophets and patriarchs there that ours ain’t a circumstance to, for rank and illustriousness and all that.  Some were from Jupiter and other worlds in our own system, but the most celebrated were three poets, Saa, Bo and Soof, from great planets in three different and very remote systems.  These three names are common and familiar in every nook and corner of heaven, clear from one end of it to the other—­ fully as well known as the eighty Supreme Archangels, in fact—­ where as our Moses, and Adam, and the rest, have not been heard of outside of our world’s