An account

I perfectly remember both these dreams of my mother's, as she related them to me before receiving the answers to her letters to my aunt. In answer to inquiries, she adds : — January 23rd, 1885. Mother is not in the habit of dreaming of accidents, and as far as she can remember it was the only time she has ever dreamt of an accident. The carriage did not upset. The facts are as follows : — My aunt has a very light cab built by my uncle especially for her, and on one occasion my aunt was driving along a narrow road, when her coachman whipped up the horses, and began driving at a furious pace. My aunt, alarmed, looked through the little window at the back of the carriage, and saw a great dray with a runaway horse tearing after the carriage. Just as it must have run into it and smashed it, the coachman turned the cab into an opening in the road. It was the only place in the road where the cab could have stopped, and it was the coachman's only hope to reach it, and the dray rushed by, leaving the cab unharmed. It did a great deal of damage, and the driver was killed. You see mother did not dream exactly the facts of the case, but only that my aunt was nearly killed by a carriage accident. As to the ' other intimations of danger,' &c., they are this, that whenever anything happens to those dear to her she always knows there is something happening. For instance, I was laid up with a very bad cough and cold when away from her last year, and she wrote me an anxious letter, saying, she knew I was ill, for she had an idea I had inflammation of the lungs. Last month I was suffering dreadfully from toothache, and determined I would go and have two teeth out without saying anything to mother, for fear of worrying her ; she thought I was going for a walk, but all the time I was gone she was so unhappy about me, and S. told me when I had come back that mother had cried and been wretched all the time. You see the things are not big enough to attract much attention, but we in the house know them to be true. [It is not quite clear how far the vision (A) coincided with a sudden and marked change in the state of the agent. Also it is possible that the doctor's visit, or the expectation of it, may have called up her mother's image to Mrs. W.'s mind, and that her illness may have rendered her specially liable to hallucination. It would remain noteworthy (unless there was special reason to fear the attack of fatal illness) that the apparition produced a true conviction in Mrs. W.'s mind as to what was occurring to her mother.