“That’s what it’s all for,” was the candid admission. “The L——s are all right, but it’s for Mother dearest and the Family that I’m here.... This isn’t exactly what religious people call heaven, but it is life eternal in the biggest sense. But I can’t be quite happy in it unless you whom I love so much are happy, too. Don’t you backslide! Only let me have a chance, and I’ll keep you convinced; but doubt is the hardest thing to combat because it destroys the very proof we are trying to bring against it. Believe every suggestion of me until it is proved false.”
One of us asked whether their greatest difficulties in communicating with us were caused by doubt or by dishonest messengers.
“Both. It is hard to find a good messenger, but, having found one, doubt is apt to destroy all his work.”
“All four points of the compass, Mother dearest.” This we took to be an allusion to his writing along the four edges of the table, earlier in the evening. “You see, we have not much time left, and you must go home fortified and happy, and glad for yourself and me.... It will mean a lot to Dad. He has thought I was in some remote and far-off heaven, and he will like to know that we are working more nearly shoulder to shoulder than ever before, as we are in some ways.... I want to talk to him straight.” Long afterward one of his sisters told me that “shoulder to shoulder” was a characteristic phrase of Frederick’s.
Again sliding over to the lower right-hand corner, he wrote quickly, in big swinging script, upside down to me: “Mother dearest, don’t forget the four points of the compass. I want you to remember that I am your boy come back. Not lost at all. Please remember that.”
When a fresh surface offered and the pencil was placed at my left, as usual, he said, “No,” and swung once more down to the right, writing quickly and firmly toward the left and upside down to me.
“I am going to write a little letter to Dad and the girls. I love them just as well as ever, and it hurts me to have them think I am not alive and loving them, because I know they still love me.
“Frederick.”
Although the movement in this reversed writing is rapid and definite, as if great energy were exerted to accomplish it, it is extremely difficult to follow, perhaps because the muscles of the hand are accustomed to move from left to right in writing, or because the mind instinctively resists a movement it cannot readily understand.