“Nor are you likely to do so,” chuckled Anon. “Mothers-in-law go to Paradise without any preliminary probation. Adam had no mother-in-law, you know, so he insisted that he wasn’t going to put up with any one’s else. Lucifer was glad to accede to Adam’s request for banishing these marital appendages, for he feared that if he allowed the mothers-in-law to enter Hades, he would be out of a job within twenty-four hours. No man ever doubted that his wife’s mother could outpoint the devil.” I glanced in alarm at Dr. Roget, who appeared to be choking, but soon I discovered that he was merely swallowing half a dozen pages of his “Thesaurus” preparatory to communicating his ideas to us. He spoke slowly, biting off a word, chewing it until it was thoroughly digested, and then spitting it forth with the retort of a verbal bomb. His speech lasted as long as the paper held out, which he later explained by saying that he never could speak without notes. “If the world knew that the mother-in-law is a rarer bird in Hades than a political blackbird hanging over both sides of the fence under the plum tree, the earth would be depopulated faster by that news than by the Oslerized process. Charon would have to charter all the world’s warships for transports and each man in Hades would have to make a jack o’ lantern of his skull to prevent being run down by the crowd of onrushing shades. Hades would no longer be a country of suburban cottages but a Hell of Harlem flats.” “We are wandering farther away from the subject under discussion than any convention of preachers I ever knew,” said David. “Isn’t it about time we had a text? I would suggest: ‘And Saul took the sword and fell upon it.’” “You see I didn’t have Dr. Osler for a medical adviser,” explained Saul. “In my day, when we wanted to shorten the duration of our stay on that planet called the earth, we cut it. Methinks an opiate would have deadened the edge of the sword when I walked the plank.” “Dr. Osler has gone me one better,” said David. “He has revised the Psalms to read: The days of a man are two score years, and if, by reason of any extraordinary fund of vitality, he shall linger around until he is three score without the ten, he had better get a hustle on and remove himself, for he is in the way of some one else.”