by a Mr. Ashton who had extensive acquaintance and some five years'
experience in New Zealand. We found this position ideal, and in the
perfection of all the conditions necessary for our experiments possessed
by it, made the realization at that time utterly unsuspected by either
of us, of our final designs, commensurately more simple.

I left New York with my father filled with a curious expectancy. I
seemed to cherish no regret at leaving my childhood's home. I only felt
a vague wondering delight to go abroad and see strange and new things.
My seclusion with my father had developed in me a singular inaptitude
for companionship with boys of my own age, and furthermore from the
influence of his rather poetic and dreaming nature, I began to show a
half wistful intensity of interest in things occult, mysterious and
difficult. We left New York in 1882, and it was then that I read for
diversion in my long ride to California, Colonel Olcutt's Esoteric
Buddhism.

The whole central fancy of reincarnation affected me deeply. But I
modified the idea as displayed by Blavatsky and Theosophists generally.
From a long familiarity with the stars, in conjunction with the
inevitable creative and anthropomorphic sensibility of youth, I began to
think that this reincarnation did not occur on the earth, but had its
stages of transmutation placed elsewhere. In short, I amused myself
incessantly with placing the poets in one star, the novelists in
another, the scientists in a third, the mechanicians in a fourth, and in
each I imagined a Utopia. A very little mature thought and the most
ordinary observation of plain men, men who at 20 have far more practical
sense than I possess to-day, would have demonstrated the hopelessness of
this arrangement, and the deplorable social chaos it would have led to.