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