passes through the clothes and flesh and enables us to see into the heart and mind of one another. The other day Paul Jones met George Washington, walking arm in arm with King George the Fourth. He stopped to say: “Admiral, I’m glad my children are giving you the honors which are justly yours.” Yet as his mind was as an open book, Jones read his thoughts thus: “‘Why couldn’t that meddlesome Porter let well enough alone, instead of bringing a mummy[Pg 23] from France to oust me from my place as first in the hearts of my countrymen?’” [Pg 23] Sherlock Holmes puffed reflectively on the shade of a cigar for a few moments; then knocking off an imaginary ash, he continued: “Whether matches are made in Heaven is a question, but they certainly are not made in Hell, despite the abundance of brimstone and the presence of Lucifer. Courtship is impossible where the heart betrays and fine words are belied by revealed thoughts, where the naked truth cannot be clothed in ‘fig’ language. When all reality has vanished, there can be no delusion, so that men who seldom spoke in the other world save to utter a falsehood have come to speak the truth here. There is only one exception—George Washington.” “You are rather hard on—” “Remember that Hades is the only land which holds the mirror up to nature. In the flash of the earth’s footlights, we act our part in the play of life to dazzle other men and blind them to our faults. Life is a series of poses, each like the film of a moving picture which by the juggling of the operator suggests continuous action, though composed of many lifeless photographs. Our life is an optical illusion. We are judged by what men see us do and yet they perhaps never see us when the mask is off and we have forgotten to pose. We strike our attitude and the world[Pg 24] applauds or jeers. Only when life’s candle is snuffed out do we forget to pose, for then a great awe is upon us. What a haunting thought it is that ‘the evil that men do lives after them’! In life we hugged our sins to ourselves, guarding them zealously; so in death, why cannot they, like the good we do, be decently interred with our bones? When we are laid low, why must our sins go on a rampage of their own, both in the upper and the under worlds? In Hades the mask has been torn away and we see man as he is, not as he would have us see him.” [Pg 24] “That must be diverting.”
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