to send
upward its powerful sensitizing odors that turn energy into languorous
desire, and touch the senses with indolence; at that moment the Morse
register spoke!

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.

"I have since learned that I did not reach Mars in that identical moment
when I found myself sitting in the hall. I had come to it, as all
disembodied spirits from the earth come to it at one receiving point, a
high hill not f