oth believe the means must be something like this wireless
telegraphy, I must imbed in my mind the whole system we have developed,
and especially make myself almost intuitively familiar with the Morse
alphabet. Beating, beating, beating upon my brain substance this
ceaselessly reiterated mechanical language, it will become so
incorporated, that even in the surviving mind I shall find its traces
and be able to use it.

"So I have concluded to put aside almost everything else and think and
live in the thought only of this coming experience. You understand me?
You sympathize in this? Yes, yes, I shall get ready for this supreme
experiment which may at last, to a long waiting world, bring some
reasonable assurance that death does not end all. As I think of it, as I
look forward to meeting your mother, the whole prospect of death grows
wonderfully interesting and sublimely welcome. And yet, my son, you, you
who have been so patient, so kind, giving up your life for my
convenience and pleasure, I dread to leave you. But I will speak to you!
Watch! wait! and at that instrument upstairs, which I know responded to
some waves of magnetism crossing the oceans of space, I shall be heard
by you in English words, opening up the mysteries of other worlds!"

He stopped in sheer exhaustion with his whole face charged with almost
frantic ecstacy. It seemed to me so natural, nurtured in the same
impossible dreams, that I saw nothing ludicrous in his hopes.

From that day on we gave ourselves up to telegraphing from our two
stations, while my father again and again consulted models of our
transmitters and receivers. This excitement lasted a long time and it
did seem psychologically certain that in any disembodied condition my
father would be likely to recall some important parts or all of this
well learned lesson.

For years my father, as I mentioned before, in his astronomical studies,
had limited himself to the study, photography and drawing of the
surfaces of our planetary neighbors. Mars particularly fascinated him,
for he had, by some illusion or accident of thought fixed his belief
firmly that Mars represented his future post mortem home.

The progress of study of the physical features of Mars had been
considerable. With these results my father and I were very familiar, had
been in correspondence with certain astronomical centers with regard to
them, and had even contributed something toward the elucidation of the
problems thus