(306) " I found the lady who is now my wife at a large public institution to which I was appointed headmaster, in 1872. On leaving her situation, I induced her, for certain reasons, to conceal the fact of our intended marriage from those of her friends whom she had left behind at the school, and the only way to do this was not to write to any of them.

"Some six months after our marriage, I was reading in bed, according to a habit of mine, my wife asleep at my side, when she awoke suddenly, sat up, and exclaimed, in very earnest tones, 'Oh, I have been to - '.

I, of course, treated what she forthwith began to relate to me as a more than usually vivid dream, and the next day ceased to think of it. She, however, recurred to her dream from time to time, and I remember the circumstantial way in which she dwelt upon each point of it, especially a peculiar expression which I did not forget, though I made no written note of it at the time. Three months later my wife went to visit her mother, and found there a letter from one of her friends, urgently entreating some one to write and say whether Miss - (my wife) was alive or dead.

I was induced to go and see the writer, and then ascertained the cause of her hastily written and strangely worded epistle. The two occurrences on the same day - as well as I could fix the date, for neither of us were quite certain as to that essential particular - present a coincidence which I have never been able satisfactorily to explain on any hypothesis consistent with what is at present known of nature's laws.

"My wife dreamt that she was in a well-remembered room, at the base of the building, in company with four females - two of whom were old friends and two strangers to her. They were talking and laughing and preparing to retire to their several sleeping apartments. She saw one of them turn off the gas. She followed them upstairs, entered with two of them into a bedroom, saw 'Bessie' place some things in a box, undress, and get into bed; then she went to her, took her by the hand, and said, 'Bessie, let us be friends.' So much for the dream.

"The writer of the letter gave me this account of what had occasioned her writing; and I need scarcely say that I did not first mention what my wife had dreamt, for in that case it might be supposed that I had myself assisted in suggesting the remarkable expression, which, in my opinion, removes the occurrence from the category of ' remarkable coincidences.' She and her friend, ' Bessie,' had gone to bed one Sunday night, when an alarming cry from the latter brought the other to her bedside: ' I have just seen - ' (my wife);' she touched me and said, "Let us be friends." '

1 See pp. 217-21.

"The next day, on discussing the matter, though some of them thought that Bessie had been dreaming, and imagined what she declared she saw, others thought it a ' sign ' that my wife was dead. And the one who was the best scribe amongst them undertook to write to the only address they possessed, in order to ascertain the truth. The letter had not been forwarded to us because my wife had, it seems, told her mother my wish that no communication with her former friends should take place.

"The odd thing about the dream is that my wife had always been on good terms with ' Bessie,' and was so on parting with her.

"In the foregoing account of the dream, and what I may call its complement, I omit many minor points, such as the fact that two new comers had taken the place of two former friends of my wife; that the effect on both my wife and Bessie was beyond what any ordinary dream would have produced; and that the two females, whom my wife in her dream saw enter the bedroom, did really occupy the same room".

[It is much to be regretted that we have had no opportunity of examining the letter; but the correspondence of the two experiences would hardly have impressed Mr. Smith as it did, if it had not included a very striking detail].

The evidential weakness of this narrative is, of course, the doubt as to the exactitude of the coincidence. Supposing the two experiences to have fallen on the same night, we can hardly help connecting "Bessie's" impression (which seems to have been a hallucination and not a dream) with Mrs. Smith's remarkable vision; which latter is again, apparently, an instance of thought-transference of that extreme form which I have described as telepathic clairvoyance.

That this last word is the appropriate one for describing (it is far enough of course from explaining) the process appears from other examples; and a glance at the condition of these reciprocal cases will show that it would naturally be so. There is, as a rule, no difficulty in deciding to which of the two persons concerned the origin of the complex phenomenon should be traced; since one of the two is in a more or less abnormal condition, as compared to the other. In Mrs. Smith's case, the abnormality (outwardly at any rate) was nothing beyond sleep; but in other examples it is far more pronounced. If, then, it is A who is in the abnormal state - dying, or whatever it may be - we attribute B's vision of him to that state. But we cannot inversely attribute A's vision of B to B's state, if B's state is completely normal. It may, no doubt, be said that B's state ceases to be normal at the moment when A affects him; and that possibly the power to react telepathically on the impression is started by the mere fact of receiving it.

But the more natural account of the matter would surely trace A's impression, no less than B's, to the peculiarity of A's state - by supposing either that A's power to act abnormally in a certain direction has involved an abnormal extension of his own susceptibility in the same direction; or else that some independently caused extension of his own susceptibility has involved the power to act abnormally.1 In either case, his reception of the impression would be active rather than passive; of the sort that partly seems (as I tried to express it before) like the momentary using of B's faculties - although B's state is not now, as in the former clairvoyant pictures and dreams,1 supplying any exceptional telepathic stimulus. Still, though A's per-cipience may not be conditioned by B's state, it must, I conceive, be conditioned by B's existence and relation to A; and the distinction again stands clear between telepathic clairvoyance, and that alleged independent clairvoyance where what is discerned cannot be traced in any natural way to the contents of any other human mind.

1 This latter hypothesis seems specially applicable to cases where A's condition has been one of mere sleep or trance, and not abnormal in any more serious way. For, considering that nearly all the evidence that exists for the reality of clairvoyance goes further to show that sleep and trance are the conditions most favourable to it.

The next example is from the Hon. Mrs. Parker, of 60, Elm Park Gardens, S.W., who wrote to us on May 24th, 1883: -