Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit To Heaven (1909) is a science fiction short story by Mark Twain. Excerpt from the book: '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 wasn'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. 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 wasn't anything but just a flash and a vanish, you see. But after I got outside of our astronomical system, I used to flush a comet occasionally.' Artist Bio Author: Mark Twain (1835-1910) was an American writer, entrepreneur, publisher and lecturer. Among his novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.