states, can produce apparitional impression on
another, or others. From a valued medical friend
I have heard a remarkable story tending to this.
A gentleman and his wife, being in bed, had
simultaneously the impression of a female being
in the room, whom the husband alone recognised
(for the wife had never seen her) as a lady to
whom he had formerly been engaged to be
married. It turned out, afterwards, that the spectral
impression had been produced on the night of the
marriage of the lady with another person.

In the following case, for which I am
personally responsible, there is a singular complication
of causes and transmission of thought:

There was a very dear friend of my younger
days, whom I will call Owens. When we were
both at a private tutor's together, at a sequestered
village in Surrey, he, I, and a third young
man, were almost inseparable, and used to spend
our leisure time in rambling, side by side,
through the romantic lanes that are not so
beautiful anywhere as amidst the sand-rocks,
hazel-hedges, and violet banks, of Surrey.

Imagine the three friends scattered into
various paths of life. I am married; Owens
who ran down from business to be present at
that marriage, is in his father's banking-house;
the third and youngest friend (give him the
name of Inson) is studying for the Church at
Cambridge. Now, Owens, who had been used
to a country life, hard gallops over the Surrey
heaths, and exercise of all kinds, pays the
penalty of confinement to the desk, and falls
ill. In this illness I visit him as a physician,
twice, and find him suffering under a
spasmodic affection of the hip, of a mysterious
kind, to which all the resources of medicine
bring no relief. The last time I ever beheld
him on earth was at East Sheen, where his
family had taken a cottage for the sake of
affording him country air. The acuteuess of
his attack seemed passed. Only immense weakness
remained behind the apparently conquered
malady; but the patient was placed on a
fortifying diet, and was promised eventual restoration.
I found him dressed as usual, lying on a
sofa, but I did not like the unearthly beauty of
his face; always handsome, it was now refined
into something spiritual, and the large blue eyes,
the crimson lips, the hectic tinge upon a waxen
ground, were indications not to be mistaken.

Still, I did not think the end near at hand.
He had a good appetite, and was lively and
confident, and so were those about him. When
his two sisters came smiling into the room to
warn me that my quarter of an hour had
expired, and when, accompanying me into the
drawing-room, they expressed their gay
conviction that their brother was quite over the
worst of it, and would go out walking in a
few days, I caught some temporary infection
from the cheerfulness of the family; all the
more, too, because my friend's wasted face and
thin hand were no longer before me.

I must observe that, in the course of the
quarter of an hour's interview, Owens once
gave a keen, quivering glance to the past days.
Something like this he said: "I have been
longing to have a walk in our old Surrey lanes
again! Do you remember how often we used
to stroll about there?"

On a calm reviewal of that quarter of an hour,
I seem to discern that Owens knew he would
die shortly. But, it is important to the integrity
of my story that the reader should bear in mind
the fact, that I left my friend without the least
idea that he was in immediate danger.

I have to ask of my reader, belief in an
assertion which may appear singular, but which
is true, nevertheless, and which can only be
accounted for, partly, by my own temperament,
which with difficulty admits two
coexistent trains of thought or sensation (if I am
absorbed, I am absorbed), and partly by a
general metaphysical mystery: namely, that things
are sometimes holden from one, as it were, while
they are taking place, or verifying themselves,
till, at some stated hour, a light seems to flash
in upon us, and show connectedly a hundred
little separate circumstances all joining and
coalescing together in one astounding group.

The assertion for which I demand belief is
this: Owens, for many days, was put wholly
out of my head. I was newly married: I
was going with my wife a round of visits, and
always changing scene and place. This is some
explanation of a forgetfulness which, after all, is
strange, and the more strange, because my
wife and I were (at the period to which I
would bring my reader) staying at a friend's
house in Surrey, close upon the scene of my early
intimacy with Owens.

One lovely summer evening, not a week from
the time when I had last seen Owens on his
sick sofa, Mrs. Cranstoun (I give myself the
name) and I, rode out together on horseback.
The day (a July day) had been hot; the evening
was sultry. We buried ourselves in a
labyrinth of those Surrey lanes, which form
an arch overhead like the tilt of a waggon.
We were in the neighbourhood of Hascombe
—the old neighbourhood. But we approached
the scene of old days by a way quite different
from that to which I had been accustomed.
Now, it was nearly nine o'clock; it was dusk;
we were in a long lane that was all dark
with boughs above us; but, where the lane
seemed to take a sudden turn a good way
off, the red-gold sky streamed brightly in.
There was a dark archway to a vista of light;
and, in that archway, just in the midst, and
strongly defined by the light all around it,
stood a figure. Right in the middle of the road
it stood, and had the appearance of a man in a
cloak, standing with his back to the light: with
his face towards us, but bent down, and almost
shrouded by the folds of the cloak. The lane
was so narrow, that it did not admit of two
persons riding side by side. I was first. From
the moment I saw the figure an uneasy sensation
came over me. Suddenly, I connected something
sinister with this figure. Involuntarily, I
recollected that a man, in the avenue leading to my
father's house, had so waited for a guest coming