investigations. He found in them a new solace and distraction, but even
then his passion for research would not have sufficed to adequately meet
his desperate desire to escape his grief, if in a rather singular manner
there had not come to him an intimation of the possibilities of some
sort of communication with my mother through these very investigations
in electricity and magnetism in which he had been engaged.

I had become quite inseparable from him. He found in me many suggestions
in face and manner of my mother, and particularly he was interested in
my peculiar lapses into meditation and introspection which in many ways
suggested to him a similar habit in her. On one occasion when, as was
his wont, before we finally left the old home at Irvington, he had taken
me in the summer evenings to the top of the observatory, then situated
about half a mile west of the Albany road, we had both been silently
watching the sun sink into a bank of golden haze, and the black band of
the Palisades passing underneath like a velvet zone of shadow, I turned
to my father and in a sudden access of curiosity said:

"Father, if mother had gone to the Sun, would she speak to us now with a
ray of light?"

My father smiled patiently, half amused, and then standing and looking
at the sun's disk, disappearing behind the Jersey hills, said, "My son,
it was a curious thought of a well-known French writer, Figuer, who lost
his son, who was very dear to him, that his soul with armies and hosts
of other souls, had departed to the sun and that they made the light and
heat of this great luminary, and this wise man felt some comfort in the
thought that the heat and light of the sun as he felt himself bathed in
radiance and warmth were emanations from his boy, and his eyes and body
seemed then in a figurative, and yet to him, very real way,