I left New York with my father filled with a curious expectancy. I seemed to cherish no regret at leaving my childhood's home. I only felt a vague wondering delight to go abroad and see strange and new things. My seclusion with my father had developed in me a singular inaptitude for companionship with boys of my own age, and furthermore from the influence of his rather poetic and dreaming nature, I began to show a half wistful intensity of interest in things occult, mysterious and difficult. We left New York in 1882, and it was then that I read for diversion in my long ride to California, Colonel Olcutt's Esoteric Buddhism. The whole central fancy of reincarnation affected me deeply. But I modified the idea as displayed by Blavatsky and Theosophists generally. From a long familiarity with the stars, in conjunction with the inevitable creative and anthropomorphic sensibility of youth, I began to think that this reincarnation did not occur on the earth, but had its stages of transmutation placed elsewhere. In short, I amused myself incessantly with placing the poets in one star, the novelists in another, the scientists in a third, the mechanicians in a fourth, and in each I imagined a Utopia. A very little mature thought and the most ordinary observation of plain men, men who at 20 have far more practical sense than I possess to-day, would have demonstrated the hopelessness of this arrangement, and the deplorable social chaos it would have led to. I think, however, that along this line of feeling I grew more and more in sympathy with my father's dimly expressed hopes to achieve something tangible in the way of interstellar or planetary communication. So that gradually he, by reason of a desire that slowly invaded every emotional recess of his being, and I, through the vagaries of an imaginative mind reached successively an intense conviction that we should work in this direction. There was much in our scientific work also that encouraged a certain high mindedness and liberty of speculation, a careless audacity before the most difficult tasks. The resolution of matter into a phase of energy, the interpretation of light as an electric phenomenon, the mysteries of the electric force itself, the peculiar hypotheses about the force of gravitation, lead men, studying these subjects, and endowed with speculative tendencies to conceive, moved also by a quasi sensational desire to reach new results, that the most extravagant achievements are possible to science.