I am sometimes inclined to believe that Life itself is a Humbug--that the man who makes the best of it is the one who escaped being born. We know not whence we came or what for, whither we go or what we'll do when we get there. True it is that life is not altogether labor and lees--there's some skittles and beer; but the most of us get more shadow than shunshine, more cholera-morbus than cream. Man born of woman is of few days and full of politics. The moment he hits the globe he starts for the grave, and his only visible reward for long days of labor and nights of pain is an epitaph he can't read and a tombstone he don't want. In the first of the Seven Ages of man he's licked, in the last he's neglected, and in all the others he's a fair mark for the shafts of falsehood. If he don't marry his first love, he's forever miserable, and if he does, he wishes he were dead. By the time he has learned wisdom he leaves the world, is hustled into a hell of fire or an orthodox heaven, and for forty years I've been trying to figure out which of these appalling evils to avoid. In one place the climate is hot and unhealthy, in the other the inhabitants never entertained an original idea--believed everything they were told. Think of having to live through all eternity with the strictly orthodox--people who regard freedom of thought as foul blasphemy, millions of immaculate bricks cast in the same mold! No wonder there's neither marrying nor giving in marriage in heaven. Just imagine a couple of love-sick loons having nothing to do but spoon from everlasting to everlasting, to talk tutti-frutti through all eternity--never a break or breathing spell in the lingering sweetness long drawn out! Amelia Rives Chanler or Ella Wheeler Wilcox couldn't stand it. Nor could I. By the time I had lived ten thousand years with a female who could fly, and had nothing in God's world to do but watch me, I'd either raise a revolution or send in my resignation. It is said that Satan had an affaire d'amour while he was playing Seraph. If the object of his affections wore feathers I don't much wonder that he went over the garden wall. I suspect that the orthodox heaven and hell, of which we hear so much, are Humbugs. I should know something of those interesting ultimates--be qualified to speak ex cathedra--for a doctor of divinity recently denounced me as a child of the devil. In that case you behold in me a prince imperial, heir-apparent to the throne of Pluto, the potential master of more than a moiety of mankind. But don't tell anybody that I've got a title, that I belong to the oldest nobility, or all the Goulderbilts will be trying to buy me.