s
country wants, to make it take the cake, is a hell that the wayfaring
man, though a democrat or a greenbacker, can see with the naked eye. The
way it is now, the sinner, if he wants to find out anything about the
hereafter, has to take it second handed, from some minister or deacon
who has not seen it himself, but has got his idea of it from some other
fellow who maybe dreamed it out.

Some deacon tells a sinner all about the orthodox hell, and the sinner
does not know whether to believe him or not. The deacon may have lied to
the sinner some time in a horse trade, or in selling him goods, and beat
him, and how does he know but the same deacon is playing a brace game on
him on the hereafter, or playing him for a sardine.

Now, if the people who advance these ideas of heaven or hell, had a
license to point to the moon, the nice, cool moon, as heaven, which
would be plausible, to say the least, and say that it was heaven, and
prove it, and could prove that the sun was the other place, which looks
reasonable, according to all we have heard about 'tother place, the moon
would be so full there would not be standing room, and they would
have to turn republicans away, while the sun would be playing to empty
benches, and there would only be a few editors there who got in on
passes.

Of course, during a cold winter, when the thermometer was forty or fifty
degrees below zero, and everybody was blocked in, and coal was up to
seventeen dollars a ton, the cause of religion would not prosper as much
as it would in summer, because when you talked to a sinner about leading
a different life or he would go to the sun, he would look at his coal
pile and say that he didn't care a continental how soon he got there,
but these discouragements would not be any greater than some that the
truly good people have to contend with now, and the average the year
round would be largely in favor of going to the moon.

The moon is very popular now, even, and if it is properly advertised as
a celestial paradise, where only good people could get their work in,
and where the wicked could not enter on any terms, there would be a
great desire to take the straight and narrow way to the moon, and the
path to the wicked sun would be grown over with sand burs, and scorched
with lava, and few would care to take passage by that route. Anyway,
this thing is worth looking into.

UNSCREWING THE TOP OF A FRUIT JAR.

There is one thing that there should b