“So I have concluded to put aside almost everything else and think and live in the thought only of this coming experience.  You understand me?  You sympathize in this?  Yes, yes, I shall get ready for this supreme experiment which may at last, to a long waiting world, bring some reasonable assurance that death does not end all.  As I think of it, as I look forward to meeting your mother, the whole prospect of death grows wonderfully interesting and sublimely welcome.  And yet, my son, you, you who have been so patient, so kind, giving up your life for my convenience and pleasure, I dread to leave you.  But I will speak to you!  Watch! wait! and at that instrument upstairs, which I know responded to some waves of magnetism crossing the oceans of space, I shall be heard by you in English words, opening up the mysteries of other worlds!”

He stopped in sheer exhaustion with his whole face charged with almost frantic ecstacy.  It seemed to me so natural, nurtured in the same impossible dreams, that I saw nothing ludicrous in his hopes.

From that day on we gave ourselves up to telegraphing from our two stations, while my father again and again consulted models of our transmitters and receivers.  This excitement lasted a long time and it did seem psychologically certain that in any disembodied condition my father would be likely to recall some important parts or all of this well learned lesson.

For years my father, as I mentioned before, in his astronomical studies, had limited himself to the study, photography and drawing of the surfaces of our planetary neighbors.  Mars particularly fascinated him, for he had, by some illusion or accident of thought fixed his belief firmly that Mars represented his future post mortem home.

The progress of study of the physical features of Mars had been considerable.  With these results my father and I were very familiar, had been in correspondence with certain astronomical centers with regard to them, and had even contributed something toward the elucidation of the problems thus presented.

In 1884, before the Royal Society, some notes on the aspect of Mars, by Otto Baeddicker, were read by the Earl of Rosse.  They were accompanied by thirteen drawings of the planet and showed many features represented on the Schiaparelli charts.  W.F.  Denning in 1885, remarked upon “the seeming permanency of the chief lineaments on Mars, and their distinctiveness of outline.”  Schiaparelli confirmed his previous observations upon the duplications of the canals and Mr. Knobel published some sketches.

In 1886, M. Terby presented to the Royal Academy of Belgium notes on drawings made by Herschell and Schroeter, indicating the so-called Kaiser Sea.  M. Perrotin at the Nice Observatory was able to redetect Schiaparelli’s canals, which elicited the remark that “the reality of the existence of the delicate markings discovered by the keen-sighted astronomer of Brera seems thus fully demonstrated, and it appears highly probable that they vary in shape and distinctness with the changes of the Martial seasons.”