An account

I told my mother and an uncle at once about the strange appearance before the news arrived, and also to my father directly he returned, all of whom are now dead. They advised me to try to dismiss it from my memory, but agreed that it could not be imagination, as I described my uncle so exactly ; and they did not consider me to be either of a nervous or superstitious temperament. 1 In conversation, Captain Golt applied almost the same words to the appearance of tenuous blue mist as Mr. J. Russell Lowell used (see Vol II., p. xxii.) in describing his purely subjective phantasms. 560 THE DEVELOPMENT OF [chap. I am quite sure that I stated the facts truthfully and correctly to Major Taylor. The facts are as fresh in my memory as if they ouly happened yesterday, although so many years have passed away. I can assure you that nothing of the kind ever occurred to me before or since. [This is in answer to the question whether Miss L. had ever had a hallucination of the senses on any other occasion.] Neither have I been subject to nervous or imaginative fancies. This strange apparition was in broad daylight, and, as I was only reading the Illustrated Newspaper, there was nothing to excite my imagination. A notice in the Leicester Chronicle shows that the death occurred on August 4, 1855, and the incident is therefore more remote than Miss L. imagined.