Could my ears have deceived me? No! It was running, running, running, intelligible, strong, definite; it seemed to me of almost piercing loudness, although just audible. I bent over, seized my pad and wrote. The Abyss of Death was bridged! From behind the veil of that inexorable silence which lies beyond the grave came a voice--and what a voice! The clicking of a telegraphic register in signals, that the whole world knew and used. I was quiet, preternaturally so, I think, as I took down the message. I became almost aged in the intense rigidity of my absorption. I was told the Dodans came up and saw me, heard the telltale clicks of the register, and unnoticed left me. Still I wrote on, unheeding the time. My assistants, pale with wonder, stood around me. The measured tappings were the ghostly voices of another world. This message began at 10 a.m., Sept. 25, 1893. It ended at 10 p.m. on the same day. It came quite evenly, though slowly, and was unmistakably intended to be inerrantly recorded, as indeed it was. CHAPTER III. "My son," it began, "I am indeed in the red orb of light we have so often looked up to when we were together on the earth, and about which our wondering minds hazarded so many fruitless guesses. I have been here a short time, and now am able to return to you, by that cipher we so fortunately printed upon the tablet of memory, word of my existence. "I can hardly describe to you my occurrence on this planet. I found myself here without any recollection of whence I had come, without a traceable thought of anything I had ever heard before. "I was suddenly sitting in a high room, brilliantly lighted by a soft, tranquillizing radiance, listening to a chorus of most delicately attuned voices, indescribably sweet, penetrating and moving. Around me upon white ivory chairs arranged in an amphitheatre sat beings like myself, all looking outward upon a sloping lawn where were gathered beneath blossoming fruit trees an army, it seemed, of half shining creatures, unlike myself, singing these wonderful choruses.