“LIKE LITTLE TWITTERING SNOW BIRDS ON A LIMB”
“Waters said that the Savior would not have been admitted to Trinity Church on Sunday on account of his clothes, and if he should appear and stand at the corner of Broad and Wall for two minutes somebody would take away his halo, his sandals and his robe. He would be divested of everything that was his and be cast adrift in the darkness when the day was done.
“I may say, parenthetically, there was one Spirit we never met in the neighborhood. In fact none of our party ever seemed to have been in its presence at any time.
“At night we saw troops of sinister and ravenous shades prowling among the gloomy evil hives in this lair of Mammon like famished wolves upon ground where they had once killed.
“Waters continued his revelations, with few interruptions, for a month or more, for it took a long time to communicate his extensive knowledge of the inner workings of the up-to-date methods of gold accumulation. When he had finished I must admit that we shuddered at the damnable realities he portrayed. At one point we who had head coverings removed them reverently and bowed to Waters. Teach threw his semblance of a black wide brimmed hat into the air, with a hollow ghastly yell that brought many curious, pale peering faces up from among the old crumbling stones in the church yard.
“Captain Morgan observed that all these operations were evidently conducted without bodily risk—in other words, without the exercise of personal courage—and the necessary murder involved was accomplished by slow drawn out processes that inflicted needless suffering and misery on entirely too many people. The cutlass, the plank walking, and the ‘Long Tom’, loaded with grape-shot, were much more merciful, although less effective as profit producers. He made the point that old fashioned piracy was to a certain extent redeemed by the individual valor of the pirates. They took brave men’s chances and carried their lives in their hands, and that, at least, was one feature of their business that was entitled to respect. He considered on the whole that, from an ethical standpoint, modern methods were much more reprehensible than the old.
“Waters’ continued narrations were like tales from the Arabian Nights. They made all of us feel so insignificant that after a while we concluded that we didn’t like him. Somehow we didn’t feel very prominent when he was about, and we began to avoid him. We spent much of our time in the sub-treasury and bank vaults watching new shades vainly clutching at the money stacks with their pale fingers.
“The insane strife of the hordes of mortals to see who can die beside the biggest gold pile has always been considered a rich joke in the spirit world, for when they come among us they are unable to bring any of it with them. The accumulation in the sub-treasury is very convenient for them to gloat over and it continues their worldly illusions perfectly. As a matter of fact it is just as consistent for them to gloat over this vaulted gold in their spiritual state as it was for them to strut and swell with pride over the earthly wealth on which they had their short leases during life.
“You might be interested in knowing something of the present state of a few well known shades. Washington, Lincoln, and many other translated statesmen are no longer here. Most of the mighty dead were men of settled convictions. Long ago a lot of these potent and highly respected phantoms became disgusted with political developments and with mundane conditions generally. They left the earth’s atmosphere and are now flocking about on the moon, where there are no politics whatever and plenty of big holes and extinct craters to crawl into when perfect seclusion is desired.