communicating with his boy. You smile. I know it is with interest. Let
me read to you from Figuer's singular book what he has written about
it."

He disappeared and left me also standing and looking upward at a faint
wreath of cloud, tinged in rosiness, which floated almost in the
zenith. I was then about eleven years old, precocious for my years and
gifted with a sympathy for occult and difficult subjects that became
only intensified through the peculiar concentrated companionship I had
from day to day, and month to month enjoyed with my father.

This narrative may be inadvertently classed with those ephemeral
fictions in which the reader is constantly conscious that the dialogue
and the incidents are veritable creations. It may here be asked how
could I recall with any literalness the conversations and events of a
time so long past. I do not pretend or wish it to be thought that these
interviews with my father are here literally related. That, of course,
is beyond the limits of reasonable probability. But I do insist that in
the following pages the occurrences described are very faithful
transcripts of those connected with the peculiar inquiry and experiments
my father and myself began, and brought to a startling conclusion.
Although conducted in the form of an imaginative story the reader is
importuned to give them his most implicit credence.

My father soon returned with the small volume of Figuer and read, I
imagine, that passage which runs as follows in Chapter XIII:

"Since the sun is the first cause of life on our globe; since it is, as
we have shown, the origin of life, of feeling, of thought; since it is
the determining cause of all organized life on the earth--why may we not