Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven

Well, when I had been dead about thirty years I begun to get a little anxious.

Mind you, had been whizzing through space all that time, like a comet.

LIKE a comet! Why, Peters, I laid over the lot of them! Of course there warn't any of them going my way, as a steady thing, you know, because they travel in a long circle like the loop of a lasso, whereas I was pointed as straight as a dart for the Hereafter; but I happened on one every now and then that was going my way for an hour or so, and then we had a bit of a brush together.

But it was generally pretty one-sided, because I sailed by them the same as if they were standing still.

An ordinary comet don't make more than about 200,000 miles a minute.

Of course when I came across one of that sort - like Encke's and Halley's comets, for instance - it warn't anything but just a flash and a vanish, you see.

You couldn't rightly call it a race. It was as if the comet was a gravel-train and I was a telegraph despatch.

But after I got outside of our astronomical system, I used to flush a comet occasionally that was something LIKE