“Since Pharaoh left the Red Sea he has been on Mars. Many of those who became famous in the world for murdering on a large scale are now there. They find the redness of that planet most congenial. Napoleon still remains in the earth’s atmosphere for he still hopes that some day he will come back. Socrates, Sir Isaac Newton, Columbus, and numerous other worthy shades, are on one of the satellites of Jupiter where finally they are beyond the reach of hostile criticism. Nebuchadnezzar, who built and worshipped an image of gold, and who was dethroned by the Lord and sent into the fields to eat grass, is now at the North Pole. In that frigid silence there is no grass or gold and there will he stay forever.
“This reminds me that great multitudes of shades are waiting eagerly for Bill Hohenzollern. While it is true that, in your modern and expressive slang, he is what might be called a ‘dead one’, he has not yet been actually translated.
“In suggesting the proper disposition of a particularly offensive public malefactor, one of your American orators once advised casting him out of the universe through ‘the hole in the sky’. This hole in the sky, astronomers tell us, is somewhere off down near the Southern Cross. It is a vast void in the firmament in which there is no planet, star or other heavenly body. No starry worlds, in their eternal orbits, ever intersect that awful abyss. No stellar lights ever twinkle there—no meteors ever stream through that Stygian darkness, where creation has left an appalling and dismal blank. When William Hohenzollern comes among us there will be a gala event in the spirit world. He will be rolled up into a misty wad, loaded into a long pale tube with millions of feet of poison gas, and shot out of the cosmos through that awful hiatus among the constellations—that frightful chasm in the universe, where he will forever be beyond infinity itself—and where even the Almighty, whom he once claimed as his partner, may never again be able to find him for consultation. He will be beyond the limits of communication, and even the music of the spheres can never reach him. It’s the hole in the sky for Bloody Bill, and we are all looking forward in pleasurable anticipation to a day of great spiritual exaltation and rarefied enjoyment.
“During his eruptive period he probably acted no worse than a great many other humans would with the same opportunities—he was one of the results of a bad system—the point of a much aggravated protuberance that had to be lanced. We all realize that history has finally demonstrated that autocracy is wrong. We greatly envy you who live in an age that is beholding the dawn of cohesive democracy, and the passing of conditions that have made it possible for one man to hold the destiny of millions in the hollow of his hand. Bill will be forgiven—but after he is projected.
“One night Kinisi and I were alone in the belfry. Out in the moonlight we saw Sidi ben Musa, Red Beard, Morgan, Teach and Kidd, lined up among the tombstones in the church yard. They appeared to be making unfamiliar movements. I asked Kinisi what he thought they were doing and he replied that they seemed to be kicking themselves, and that they had been acting that way every night for a week. He thought that, like the robins in autumn, they had flocked and were preparing to migrate.
“These shades, who, in life, had been relentless highwaymen of the seas—blood bespattered, remorseless, steeped in murder, arson, theft and unnamable crimes—the heels of whose boots had dripped with human gore on a thousand decks—held their spectral hands aloft and were aghast when they realized the pitiful inconsequence and puny achievement of their futile careers.
“MY OLD TOWER IN HUNGARY”
“There was a big storm one night and we never saw them again. The valiant and hardy little band may have drifted out over the sea with the heavy off-shore wind and rolling mists, and may now be peacefully haunting the scenes of their former tame profiteering and modest killings, where spiritual life is not as strenuous as we found it in the twentieth century Gomorrah that we contemplated from the belfry of Trinity.
“Kinisi wanted to stay with Waters for a while longer, but I had had enough of modern money centers. I left one night in a freight car that was loaded with light wines and moving westward. Although it was marked for Atchison, Kansas, I had no difficulty in turning it up into Michigan, to where I seemed impelled by some unaccountable instinct. I may say incidentally that many wandering freight cars with spirits on board are now being diverted over strange routes by ghostly direction, and much of the present freight confusion is due to that cause. That was several years ago, and, so far as I know, the car is still at Benton Harbor.