An account

I cannot, owing to the many years that have passed since the occurrences mentioned, furnish any dates ; my mother calculated that the singular impression I received was as near as possible to the time of our young friend's death. My brother who brought the tidings has been deceased several years. (576) Obtained through Mrs. Pears, of Walton, Clevedon. The narrative was written down from the dictation of Mrs. C. — a relative of Mrs. Pears, a daughter of the well-known Mrs. Fry, and a member of the Society of Friends — who will not allow her name to be published, and entirely declines to be further questioned on the subject. u ]\/[arch 10th 1884 On 14th November, 1837, or about that time, Mrs. C. was lyipg on a VOL. II. 2 M 530 SUPPLEMENT. [chap. sofa in her drawing-room, reading attentively ; the sofa was facing the light. Suddenly lifting her eyes from the book, she saw distinctly, standing at the foot of the sofa, the figure of a person whom Mrs. C. knew by sight, though she was not personally acquainted with him. She observed how the figure was dressed, and even counted the buttons on his greatcoat ; five were visible above the rather high end of the sofa. The figure was opaque ; Mrs. C. noticed that she could not see the piano through it. After a few seconds, the figure disappeared as suddenly as it had come. A quarter of an hour afterwards, Mrs. C. received a visit from one of the clergymen of the town, who came to tell her of the death, by drowning at sea, of the person whose apparition she had just seen. The clergyman had left the widow's house to come straight to Mrs. C, and at the moment the apparition was present with Mrs. C, had been listening to the widow's request that he would enlist her sympathy on behalf of herself and her children. [The remoteness of the case is again a serious weakness ; and the coincidence is of a very singular type. At the same time the fact of the news following immediately on the apparition is a striking one, hardly likely to have been unconsciously imported into the narrative.] The two following cases seem to fall into the class illustrated in Chap. XIV., § 7, where persons are phantasmally seen or heard very soon before their actual appearance in the flesh. I have explained (p. 96) that it is to some extent uncertain whether this is a genuine telepathic type ; but the examples are worth recording ; and doubly so where the time-coincidence is fortified (as here and in case 262) by the further point that odd or unfamiliar details of appearance are alleged to have