At first his Mamma wouldn’t even listen to it. What! let her little boy—her little Willie—go up to that outlandish place hundreds and hundreds of miles away: oh, she couldn’t hear of it! And Willie was heart-broken.
“Why, there’s no doctor within miles of your place, is there?” she asked Eileen.
“No, we don’t want doctors; nobody ever dies up there.”
“Nobody ever dies?” echoed Marcia, Willie’s sister.
“No. We’ve seen more funerals since we came to Sydney than we ever saw in our lives. And I believe Mamma only saw about three funerals up there, and she’s been there for years and years!” said Eileen, proudly.
“Dear me! However does that happen?” asked Marcia.
“Well, you see there’s hardly anyone up there, so I suppose that accounts for some of it,” went on Eileen.
“Oh, well! no thanks to them for not dying if there’s no one there,” said Marcia, disdainfully. “I thought there might have been hundreds of people living to be about a thousand.”
“Oh! but those that are there don’t die—well, hardly ever, except old Dave and a few more I know of,” went on Eileen. “And if a lot of old people I know keep on living for a long time yet, they’ll very likely be about a hundred when they do die.”
But this argument did not move Mrs. Taylor in favor of Willie’s going. One day Willie came in with a very determined face.