Is There A Hell?

“I will not continue in a job which involves being kissed by worms like Claude Bates. No, no, no, sir!”

Mr Wrenn raised a shocked and wrathful face.
“He kissed you?”

“Yes. You had an article in the Home Companion last week, uncle, saying what a holy and beautiful thing the first kiss is. Well, Claude Bates’s wasn’t. He hadn’t shaved and he was wearing a dressing-gown. Also, he was pallid and greenish, and looked as if he had been out all night. Anything less beautiful and holy I never saw.”

“He kissed you! What did you do?”

Wim van den Heuvel en Yoka Berretty (1961)

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Mr Cornelius Recites

“I have lived in Valley Fields all my life, and would not live anywhere else if you offered me a million pounds.”

“I won’t.”

“I was born in Valley Fields, Mr Shotter, and I love the place, and I am not ashamed to say so.”

Caspar David Friedrich - Wanderer above the sea of fog
“‘Breathes there a man with soul so dead,'” inquired Mr Cornelius. “‘Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d as home his footsteps he hath turn’d from wandering on a foreign strand?'”

“Ah!” said Sam. “That’s what we’d all like to know, wouldn’t we?”

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