“Just so—just so. You’ve earned a good sleep, and you’ll get it. You’ve earned a good appetite, and you’ll enjoy your dinner. It’s the same here as it is on earth—you’ve got to earn a thing, square and honest, before you enjoy it. You can’t enjoy first and earn afterwards. But there’s this difference, here: you can choose your own occupation, and all the powers of heaven will be put forth to help you make a success of it, if you do your level best. The shoemaker on earth that had the soul of a poet in him won’t have to make shoes here.”
“Now that’s all reasonable and right,” says I. “Plenty of work, and the kind you hanker after; no more pain, no more suffering—”
“Oh, hold on; there’s plenty of pain here—but it don’t kill. There’s plenty of suffering here, but it don’t last. You see, happiness ain’t a thing in itself—it’s only a contrast with something that ain’t pleasant. That’s all it is. There ain’t a thing you can mention that is happiness in its own self—it’s only so by contrast with the other thing. And so, as soon as the novelty is over and the force of the contrast dulled, it ain’t happiness any longer, and you have to get something fresh. Well, there’s plenty of pain and suffering in heaven—consequently there’s plenty of contrasts, and just no end of happiness.”
Says I, “It’s the sensiblest heaven I’ve heard of yet, Sam, though it’s about as different from the one I was brought up on as a live princess is different from her own wax figger.”
Along in the first months I knocked around about the Kingdom, making friends and looking at the country, and finally settled down in a pretty likely region, to have a rest before taking another start. I went on making acquaintances and gathering up information. I had a good deal of talk with an old bald-headed angel by the name of Sandy McWilliams. He was from somewhere in New Jersey. I went about with him, considerable. We used to lay around, warm afternoons, in the shade of a rock, on some meadow-ground that was pretty high and out of the marshy slush of his cranberry-farm, and there we used to talk about all kinds of things, and smoke pipes. One day, says I—
“About how old might you be, Sandy?”
“Seventy-two.”
“I judged so. How long you been in heaven?”
“Twenty-seven years, come Christmas.”
“How old was you when you come up?”