XXXI THE ALTAR FIRE 235 LAST LETTERS FROM THE LIVING DEAD MAN INTRODUCTION THIS book, the third and last of the Living Dead Man series, was written between February, 1917, and February, 1918. Then I lost the ability--or perhaps I should say the inclination--to do automatic writing. As this third manuscript was shorter than the other two, I had supposed it to be a fragment which would probably never be finished; and it was not until my publisher urged me to issue it _as_ a fragment that I read it all over for the first time and discovered that it was really a complete thing, an organic whole. “Perhaps,” I told myself, surprised and still half-incredulous, “there _is_ a divinity that shapes our ends.” For had this book been published when it was written, it would have seemed premature; now the greater part of it is timely as yesterday’s editorials. For the benefit of those who have not read the earlier books of the series, “Letters From a Living Dead Man,” 1914, and “War Letters From the Living Dead Man,” 1915, I will quote from the Introductions of those books. In the first Introduction I said: “One night last year in Paris I was strongly impelled to take up a pencil and write, though what I was to write about I had no idea. Yielding to the impulse, my hand was seized as if from the outside, and a remarkable message of a personal nature came, followed by the signature ‘X.’ “The purport of the message was clear, but the signature puzzled me. “The following day I showed this writing to a friend, asking her if she had any idea who ‘X’ was. “‘Why,’ she replied, ‘don’t you know that that is what we always call Mr. ----?’ “I did not know. “Now, Mr. ---- was six thousand miles from Paris, and, as we supposed, in the land of the living. But a day or two later a letter came to me from America, stating that Mr. ---- had died in the western part of the United States, a few days before I received in Paris the automatic message signed ‘X.’ “So far as I know, I was the first person in Europe to be informed of his death, and I immediately called on my friend to tell her that ‘X’ had passed out. She did not seem surprised, and told me that she had felt certain of it some days before, when I had shown her the ‘X’ letter, though she had not said so at the time. “Naturally I was impressed by this extraordinary incident.... “But to the whole subject of communication between the two worlds I felt an unusual degree of indifference. Spiritualism had always left me quite cold, and I had not even read the ordinary standard works on the subject....