An incredulous smile crept over the faces of my newly-made friends, and by it I read the doubt that was arising in their hearts as to the truth of my utterance.
"My words are sincere," I insisted. "If you could take one bushel of your diamonds to the world where I live, you could get more soil for them than you have on your whole globe."
"That world is heaven," exclaimed a few of my hearers at once. "A world of such abundant soil cannot be any other place." Then I learned that their conception of Heaven is not a place of gold-paved streets, but a place where soil is freely distributed even on the sides of the streets.
I continued speaking, telling them how diamonds were considered in our world. These professors were astonished beyond measure at my description, and each one seemed to crave for the knowledge to transport a large consignment of their diamonds to our Earth and return with acres of soil to the Diamond World.
I spent a felicitous period with these queer-shaped scholars of the Diamond World. They prayed and begged that I should remain and appear before the corporations. Their spirits drooped when I told them that if I had any more time to spend visibly on their world I would prefer to comfort the laborers and their suffering families who had been so long deprived of the fair treatment they deserved.
My hearers became ashen with fear, now feeling doubly assured that I was a forerunner of some terrible curse that was about to fall upon the Trusts and corporations whom those professors were serving so assiduously, without ever speaking a word of protest in favor of the human slaves around them.
Once more I related my station. But I spoke in most convincing terms of the eternal curse with which the Infinite would visit the guilty of all worlds.
As I left them I saw that my last words brought no relief to their faces and, after a long silence, they nervously discussed the whole affair, not being able to account for the exceptional experience through which they had just passed.
I visited, in a form invisible, the mansions of the rich and found that the most choice ornaments on their parlor shelves consisted of vials of soil or dirt, and in the homes of the most wealthy only I saw flowering plants.
It chanced that I visited this world at the graduating period of the greater schools. This gave me privilege to hear an oration on "The Soil and the Diamond," a synopsis of which I will translate as correctly as I can. It will be remembered that I must use terms and style suitable to our language.