to avoid your asylum, a meeting there will go for nothing as a meeting,
since by that time you will easily have forgotten me and my name: did
you die a natural death, or were you cut off by a catastrophe?

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 far