"
"How do we know there's eleven hundred and one, Sandy, when they
all go off at once?--and yet we certainly do know."
"Our intellects are a good deal sharpened up, here, in some ways,
and that is one of them. Numbers and sizes and distances are so
great, here, that we have to be made so we can FEEL them--our old
ways of counting and measuring and ciphering wouldn't ever give us
an idea of them, but would only confuse us and oppress us and make
our heads ache."
After some more talk about this, I says: "Sandy, I notice that I
hardly ever see a white angel; where I run across one white angel,
I strike as many as a hundred million copper-colored ones--people
that can't speak English. How is that?"
"Well, you will find it the same in any State or Territory of the
American corner of heaven you choose to go to. I have shot along,
a whole week on a stretch, and gone millions and millions of miles,
through perfect swarms of angels, without ever seeing a single
white one, or hearing a word I could understand. You see, America
was occupied a billion years and more, by Injuns and Aztecs, and
that sort of folks, before a white man ever set his foot in it.
During the first three hundred years after Columbus's discovery,
there wasn't ever more than one good lecture audience of white
people, all put together, in America--I mean the whole thing,
British Possessions and all; in the beginning of our century there
were only 6,000,000 or 7,000,000--say seven; 12,000,000 or
14,000,000 in 1825; say 23,000,000 in 1850; 40,000,000 in 1875.
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