they get the raw material is clear beyond the
jurisdiction of my arithmetic; for I have hunted the census through and
through, and I find that there are not that many people in the United
States, by a matter of six hundred and ten millions at the very least.
They must use some of the same people over again, likely.

San Francisco is one-eighth as populous as New York; there are 60 deaths
a week in the former and 500 a week in the latter--if they have luck.
That is 3,120 deaths a year in San Francisco, and eight times as many
in New York--say about 25,000 or 26,000. The health of the two places is
the same. So we will let it stand as a fair presumption that this will
hold good all over the country, and that consequently 25,000 out of
every million of people we have must die every year. That amounts to
one-fortieth of our total population. One million of us, then, die
annually. Out of this million ten or twelve thousand are stabbed, shot,
drowned, hanged, poisoned, or meet a similarly violent death in some
other popular way, such as perishing by kerosene-lamp and hoop-skirt
conflagrations, getting buried in coal-mines, falling off house-tops,
breaking through church, or lecture-room floors, taking patent
medicines, or committing suicide in other forms. The Erie railroad kills
23 to 46; the other 845 railroads kill an average of one-third of a man
each; and the rest of that million, amounting in the aggregate to that
appalling figure of 987,631 corpses, die naturally in their beds!

You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds. The
railroads are good enough for me.

And my advice to all people is, Don't stay at home any more than you can
help; but when you have GOT to stay at home a while, buy a package of
those insurance tickets and sit up nights. You cannot be too cautious.

(One can see now why I answered that ticket-agent in the manner recorded
at the top of this sketch.)

The moral of this composition is, that thoughtless people grumble more
than is fair about railroad management in the United States. When we
consider that every day and night of the year full fourteen thousand
railway-trains of various kinds, freighted with life and armed with
death, go thundering over the land, the marvel is, NOT that they kill
three hundred human beings in a twelvemonth, but that they do not kill
three hundred times three hundred!

PORTRAIT OF KING WILLIAM III

I never can look at those periodica