“There is no change in the individual at death,” he said to me one day. “It is simply a moving out of the old house. The life vibration—the intelligence—remains the same. I shall be able by and by to chord and communicate with those no longer in the Physical House.”

Later, when I saw Edith, I said:

“The long night is telling on Ferratoni. He is becoming a spiritualist.”

Edith Gale looked thoughtful.

“If he does, he will be a scientific one,” she said, “and able to demonstrate reasonably the how and why of his inter-spheric communications. If all he says of his chorded vibrations be true, who shall say how far, and through what dim spaces they may not answer?”

You see, we had had time to speculate on a good many things during the long Antarctic Night. Even in an ordinary night, between the hours of three and five in the morning, strange problems come drifting in and the boundary lines between substance and shadow waver. Keep this up for a period of months, without a break of sunlight, and one’s skepticism on almost any point begins to totter. At the end of the third month, if Ferratoni had announced that he could render himself invisible and transport himself to any point of the compass at will, we would have been less surprised than eager to learn the process; and had Mr. Sturritt suddenly declared that he had perfected a lozenge which would confer eternal youth, I feel certain that any of us would have been willing to accept a trial package.

XXI.
AN ARRIVAL AND A DEPARTURE.

Curiously enough the sun made its first chill, brief reappearance on the anniversary of our sailing. Chill and brief it was, but that thin edge of light skirting the far northern horizon meant to all who saw it new hope, and a new hold on the realities of life.

The sky there had for some time been growing redder each day, and more than once we believed that the Captain’s calculation would be proved at fault, and that the sun itself must appear. But the Captain’s mathematics were sound, and the sun was on schedule time. In spite of Zar’s prophecy we were all there to bid it “howdy,” and there was not a soul on board, from the Admiral to the cook, that sent “regrets” to that reception. Captain Biffer had “bent on” a stiff new shirt for the occasion, and was smiling and triumphant.

“Wheah you reckon dat sun shinin’ warm, now?” Zar asked in an awed voice.