Voices

My note of the case [i.e., the original note made when he first heard Marian Hughes' account] was dated May 16th, 1878. I say, 'One Saturday evening about six weeks ago,' &c. On July 19th, in an article, I say, ' By the end of June it was known that Annie's friend had died suddenly on the evening of Saturday, 30th March, the day noted by Annie as the day of the apparition.' [Mrs. Barnes has had an auditory hallucination on one other occasion, when she heard herself called by the voice of her husband, who, it turned out, had died at a distance two days before.] It is rare for nautical stories to reach the level of evidence. The following, however, is a case where the testimony seems hardly to leave room for a doubt that a hallucination of a particular kind was experienced at a particular crisis ; and the question of its interpretation is a matter not of nautical but of scientific judgment. The statement (which was first published in the Spiritualist) was drawn up sixteen 144 TACTILE CASES AND CASES AFFECTING [chap. days after the incident occurred, through the prompt energy of Mr. W. H. Harrison, and on the suggestion of the late Mr. Cromwell F. Yarley, r F.R.S., who had questioned Captain Blacklock on the subject. y\ y (299) The steamship ' Robert Lowe ' returned to the Thames on Tues^ - day, October 1 1 th, 1 870, from St. Pierre, Newfoundland, where she had been '^ \ repairing one of the French Atlantic Telegraph Company's cables. An ^ engineer on board, Mr. W. H. Pearce, of 37, Augusta Street, East India Road, Poplar, was taken ill with the typhus fever, and on the 4th of October last he died. One of his mates, Mr. D. Brown, of 1, Edward Street, Hudson's Road, Canning Town, Plaistow, a strong, healthy man, a stoker, not likely to be led astray by imagination, attended him till the day before he died. [Brown, it appears, bore the best of characters, and had a strong friendship for Pearce.] On the afternoon before his death, at 3 o'clock, in broad daylight, Brown was attending the sick man, who wanted to get out of bed, but his companion prevented him. And this is what the witness says he saw : — ' I was standing on one side of the bunk, and while trying to prevent Pearce from rising, I saw on the other side of the bunk, the wife, two children, and the mother of the dying man, all of whom I knew very well, and they are all still living. They appeared to be very sorrowful, but in all other respects were the same as ordinary human beings. I could not see through them ; they were not at all transpa