“Now were really getting down to business,” he remarked, presently. “I had to convince Margaret before she would loosen up.” Cass began to explain that it had not been necessary to convince me, but before he was fairly started the pencil ran on: “Yes, it was. She didn’t quite believe I was running this show. Now she’s nice and amenable.” Verily, all resistance had been taken out of me! Thereafter he had his own way with the pencil. Cass began another question, but broke off, saying that it was not fair to keep Frederick answering impersonal inquiries when he wanted to talk to his mother. “That’s what it’s all for,” was the candid admission. “The L——s are all right, but it’s for Mother dearest and the Family that I’m here.... This isn’t exactly what religious people call heaven, but it is life eternal in the biggest sense. But I can’t be quite happy in it unless you whom I love so much are happy, too. Don’t you backslide! Only let me have a chance, and I’ll keep you convinced; but doubt is the hardest thing to combat because it destroys the very proof we are trying to bring against it. Believe every suggestion of me until it is proved false.” One of us asked whether their greatest difficulties in communicating with us were caused by doubt or by dishonest messengers. “Both. It is hard to find a good messenger, but, having found one, doubt is apt to destroy all his work.” “All four points of the compass, Mother dearest.” This we took to be an allusion to his writing along the four edges of the table, earlier in the evening. “You see, we have not much time left, and you must go home fortified and happy, and glad for yourself and me.... It will mean a lot to Dad. He has thought I was in some remote and far-off heaven, and he will like to know that we are working more nearly shoulder to shoulder than ever before, as we are in some ways.... I want to talk to him straight.” Long afterward one of his sisters told me that “shoulder to shoulder” was a characteristic phrase of Frederick’s. Again sliding over to the lower right-hand corner, he wrote quickly, in big swinging script, upside down to me: “Mother dearest, don’t forget the four points of the compass. I want you to remember that I am your boy come back. Not lost at all. Please remember that.” When a fresh surface offered and the pencil was placed at my left, as usual, he said, “No,” and swung once more down to the right, writing quickly and firmly toward the left and upside down to me. “I am going to write a little letter to Dad and the girls. I love them just as well as ever, and it hurts me to have them think I am not alive and loving them, because I know they still love me. “FREDERICK.”