thing I recall is your
speaking to me. And you were the last to do so. I remember seeing your
face; but I was too weak to answer."

This dialogue at first disconcerted Professor Hyslop. He had tried to
make his father tell the name of the malady from which the latter
thought he suffered--catarrh. It was only when he read over the notes of
the sitting, a little later, that he perceived all at once that his
father had been describing the last hours of his life in the terms
habitual to him. Professor Hyslop had been mistaken again. The doctor
had noticed pain in the stomach at 7 a.m. The heart action began to
decline at 9.30; this was shortly followed by terrible difficulty in
breathing, and death followed. When his father's eyelids fell, James
Hyslop said, "He is gone," and he was the last to speak. This last
incident seems to indicate that consciousness in the dying lasts much
longer than is believed.

Soon after Professor Hyslop asked his father if he remembered some
special medicine he had sent him from New York. The communicator had
much trouble in remembering the very strange name of this medicine, but
ended by giving it, though incorrectly spelled.

During the first fifteen sittings Professor Hyslop had asked as few
questions as possible, and when he was obliged to do so, he had so
expressed them that they should not contain the answer. But at the 16th
sitting he abandoned this reserve intentionally. He wished to see what
the result would be if he took the same tone with the communicator as is
taken with a friend in flesh and blood. Professor Hyslop says, "The
result was that I talked with my disincarnated father with as much ease
as if I were talking with him living, through the telephone. We
understood each other at a hint, as in an ordinary conversation." They
spoke of everything--of a fence which Robert Hyslop was thinking of
repairing when he died; of the taxes he had left unpaid; of the cares
two of his children had caused him, one of whom had never given him much
satisfaction, while the other was an invalid; of the election of
President M'Kinley and of many other things.

Can it be said that there were no inexact statements made by the
communicator during all these sittings? There are some, but very few. I
shall speak of them in the following chapter. In any case, there is no
trace of a single intentional untruth in the whole sixteen sittings.

FOOTNOTES:

[78] _Proc. of S.P.R._, vol. xvi. In what fol