the change. It gives a singularly sweet and placid conviction that my long, long night of pain-life is nearly past, the agony-hours nearly at their close; and so, feeling now emboldened and nerved to the task, the fulfilling of a design long entertained, I determined to mould into the following form certain of my
dealings with the dead.
In presenting what follows, wisdom dictates the narrative style rather than any other, for the reason that it is better calculated to entertain, interest, and instruct the reader.
Not a few people, nor those of the least informed class either, entertain many serious doubts as to the nature, perdurability, immortality, and eternality of the human soul. Of the last, probably no one in the body can ever be absolutely certain and assured; but of the former, all may be; not, perhaps, by means of what herein ensues concerning the points named, but by reason of that greater knowledge whereof what follows is the key. I present the subjoined as seriously as could anything be. To my soul the truths here revealed, transcribed from the experimental knowledge-tablets of that very soul itself, are priceless, and worth as much more than what people generally receive and accept as truth from sources whose external manifestation is through the 'Spiritualism' of the day, as these last are more valuable than the mere guesses at the truth of immortality, current previous to the advent of 'The Fox and Fish Dynasty.'
Some six hundred and fifty years, more or less, before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth—praises be to his name forever!—in the thirty-fifth Olympiad, or about two thousand five hundred years ago, there lived in the East
