The Flying Dutchman, whom Brander Matthews introduces in his _Primer of Imaginary Geography_, and who says that the Wandering Jew is the only person he can have any satisfactory chats with now, speaks of knowing Charon, "who keeps the ferry across the Styx. I met him last month and he was very proud of his new electric launch with its storage battery." He says that hell is now lighted by electricity and that Pluto has put in all the modern improvements. John Kendrick Bangs, in his _House-boat on the Styx_, brings together the shades of many illustrious persons; Queen Elizabeth, Walter Raleigh, Socrates, Xantippe, Captain Kidd, and many others. From them we get pictures of the life after death and of their characteristic attitudes toward it and each other. He continues the situation in _The Pursuit of the House-boat_, as the redoubtable Captain Kidd makes off with the ship and the ladies, leaving all the men behind. But they follow the bold buccaneer and after exciting adventures reaching from the Styx to Paris, they recapture the fair. Carolyn Wells has recently given us a Styx River Anthology. In modern stories we visit the comic devil on his native heath, see him in his own home town, as in previous chapters we discussed him in his appearances on earth. Kipling's _The Last of the Stories_ shows us the Hades of literary endeavor, the limbo of lost characters, presided over by a large and luminous devil of fluent tongue. Kipling recognizes many persons from fiction, and sees various tortures in process. All do obeisance to the shade of Rabelais, the Master. Kipling is terrified by the characters he himself has brought into being and begs to hide his face from them. F. Marion Crawford gives us another glimpse of literary eternity,[180] where the spirits of learned personages meet and discuss life. A recent poem describes a meeting and dialogue in Hades between Chaucer and Cressida. [180] In _Among the Immortals_. It is possibly Bernard Shaw who would be most liable to prosecution by the devil for lèse-majesté, for in _Man and Superman_, Mine Host of the Pit is represented as an affable gentleman who tries to make hell attractive to his guests, and exercises not the least constraint on their movements. They are free to leave him and go to heaven if they like,--he only warns them that they will find it tiresome. He converses with Don Juan and a couple of other blasé mortals, uttering Shavian iconoclasms with an air of courteous boredom. He is very different from the sinister personage of conventional fiction.