Multiple witnesses

The event narrated took place when she was about 20, and must have happened in (I think) 1844 or 1845. She told me her story very simply and vivd voce. She also told it separately to my elder sister in precisely the same terms. It was / who threw it, for brevity's sake, into the narrative form [and into the first person]. My father and mother had many children ; most of us died in infancy ; Susanna survived, and Charlotte and myself. Father's was an entailed estate, and the deaths of two sons, William, who died in boyhood, and John, who died in infancy, had been the great disappointment of his life. Susanna remembered both the boys, but William was born and died long before my time, and John died at about two years old, when I was the baby. Of William there was no likeness, but you know John's picture well, a well-painted full-length oil picture representing a toddling babe in white frock and blue shoes, one of my father's prize greyhounds crouching beside him, and an orange rolling at his feet. I was grown up, about 20, Susanna was 40, and Charlotte about 30 years old. Father was declining, and we lived together, contented and united, in a pleasant house on the borders of Harrogate Common. On the day about which I am writing, Charlotte was unwell ; she had complained of a chill, and the doctor recommended her to keep in bed. She was sleeping quietly that afternoon, and Susanna sat on one side of her bed and I sat on the other ; the afternoon sun was waning, and it began to grow dusky, but not dark. I do not know how long we had been sitting there, but by chance I raised my head and I saw a golden light above Charlotte's bed, and within the light were enfolded two cherubs' faces gazing intently upon her. 1 was fascinated and did not stir, neither did the vision fade for a little while. At last I put my hand across the bed to Susanna, and I only said this word, ' Susanna, look up ! ' She did so, and at once her countenance changed, 'Oh, Emmeline,' she said, 'they are William and John.' Then both of us watched on till all faded away like a washed-out picture ; and in a few hours Charlotte died of sudden inflammation. In conversation, Miss Walker told me that she is certain that her cousin drew the other sister's attention to the vision without mentioning what she herself saw ; also that she was singularly precise in statement and incapable of exaggeration. We find from the Register of Deaths that Miss Charlotte Bingley died at Harrogate, on June 8, 1843.