“What sort of weather have you been having?”
“There is no weather here,” said Great-grandfather. “It’s all bright and beautiful all the time.”
“You mean bright sunshine?” I said.
“There is no sun here,” said Great-grandfather.
“Then how do you mean—” I began.
But at this moment the head of the agency tapped me on the shoulder to remind me that the two minutes’ conversation for which I had deposited, as a nominal fee, five dollars, had expired. The agency was courteous enough to inform me that for five dollars more Great-grandfather would talk another two minutes.
But I thought it preferable to stop for the moment.
Now I do not wish to say a word against my own great-grandfather. Yet in the conversations which followed on successive days I found him—how shall I put it?—unsatisfactory. He had been, when on this side—to use the term we Spiritualists prefer—a singularly able man, an English judge; so at least I have always been given to understand. But somehow Great-grandfather’s brain, on the other side, seemed to have got badly damaged. My own theory is that, living always in the bright sunshine, he had got sunstroke. But I may wrong him. Perhaps it was locomotor ataxy that he had. That he was very, very happy where he was is beyond all doubt. He said so at every conversation. But I have noticed that feeble-minded people are often happy. He said, too, that he was glad to be where he was; and on the whole I felt glad that he was too. Once or twice I thought that possibly Great-grandfather felt so happy because he had been drinking: his voice, even across the great gulf, seemed somehow to suggest it. But on being questioned he told me that where he was there was no drink and no thirst, because it was all so bright and beautiful. I asked him if he meant that it was “bone-dry” like Kansas, or whether the rich could still get it? But he didn’t answer.
Our intercourse ended in a quarrel. No doubt it was my fault. But it did seem to me that Great-grandfather, who had been one of the greatest English lawyers of his day, might have handed out an opinion.
The matter came up thus: I had had an argument—it was in the middle of last winter—with some men at my club about the legal interpretation of the Adamson Law. The dispute grew bitter.