Then she asked about his presentiment of happiness on his last evening on earth, and he answered: “I suppose it was given me so I might know that the end of trouble and turmoil was at hand; but I was blind, as you all are, and did not understand.”
She begged him to relate his experiences in the new life from his first moment of consciousness. To this entreaty he replied:
“I will try to do so sometime when I am better instructed than now. As yet I am too new here to tell you what you wish to know. I have much to learn before I can be a safe teacher for anybody.”
To many questions he made neither answer nor apology for his failure to answer. It was plain that he could not, would not or dare not tell much about the life he was now living. Once in response to a particularly direct question bearing on that, he said, with a shade of sadness in the words:
“Wait in patience, and be as happy as you can till your time comes.”
And again: “Could you but see how things are carried on here you would know how foolish some of your questions are.”
From this they gathered that conditions in the unseen world are vastly different from those we are familiar with here, but in what respect they could form no idea.
He had been a strong advocate of cremation. When asked if he still held to his former opinions on that subject, he said:
“To us it makes no difference what is done with the carcass. To you it is important that it does not endanger the public health.”
Once when Cartice remarked to her friend, as they sat together awaiting Planchette’s pleasure, that perhaps the disembodied people suffer because of the destruction of their bodies, Prescott sprang upon them in a kind of fury, writing with savage haste: