“What do you think souls look like, Mr. Archibald?” she asked suddenly.
Archibald considered the subject and acknowledged that he had no theories on it.
“Well, I’ve thought about it lots,” Peg said cheerfully. Her discussions of life, death, and immortality were always imperturbably cheerful. Nothing morbid touched her. Life was a fact and death was a fact and immortality was a fact. They were all vastly interesting. Why not wonder about them and talk about them?
“I think most people have a horrid idea about souls, don’t you?” she said. “Sort of foggy, lonesome things that go floating around trying to be happy when they haven’t got anything to be happy with. Honestly, that kind of souls would have just about as good a time in heaven as Bill Briggs does at grange parties. They don’t have liquor and he says he isn’t built for conversation. I think heaven’s going to be heaps cozier than the ministers say. I’m counting on having legs and hands and eyes and nose and everything, just the way I have here, only no aches or freckles or anything, and only beautiful things to feel and see and smell—and stacks of little child angels to see to, so that we won’t miss having the old people and sick people to take care of. I’m expecting to enjoy heaven and if I do it’ll have to be mighty different from the way they tell about it.”
“I know a job in heaven that would suit you,” Archibald said, “but another angel has it. Maybe he’d take you on to help.”
“Tell me,” she urged eagerly.
“Well, it’s in the Japanese heaven; but I suppose we’ll all be talking the same language when we get over there so that won’t shut you out. There’s a Japanese angel—Jizo, they call him,—and he puts in his whole time playing with the souls of the little children that come to heaven, so that they won’t be lonesome for their mothers.”
“Oh, my stars!” The small girl was all aglow. “What a bee-autiful job! Wouldn’t it be cunning to see—all those blessed little baby souls playing around and that big kind angel making up games for them and seeing to them for God? But one angel couldn’t do it—not possibly. Maybe he could when the world started and there weren’t many children going to heaven, but now he’d have to have somebody else. Oh, I do hope he’ll let me help. That’s the most interesting thing I ever heard about heaven. Mostly it sounds stupid, but I always did think God would be too sensible to let us all sit around and rest forever. I wonder if that Jizo thought up his job for himself and asked for it or if God just gave it to him. Mr. Frisbie says the Japanese are awfully smart but that they’re ruining wages—only I don’t suppose they bother about wages in heaven. I wouldn’t want wages.”
Archibald rose and stretched himself, laughing down at the earnest little face upturned to him.
“I’m willing to bet your month’s wages here that you’ll be given a chance to take care of somebody in heaven,” he said. “They say the seraphim are for adoration and the cherubim are for service. Well, I can see you chumming with the cherubs.”