by assuming
that you may be the criminal)--or neglect an obvious duty, and return
silently." I, of course, saw that the former was the only proper course,
whatever the annoyance involved. And, all the while, there was just
about to be the very same incident for the trouble of somebody.'

Here the account breaks off; but writing again from the same place,
August 16, 1882, he takes up the suspended narrative with this question:

'Did I tell you of what happened to me on the last day of my stay here
last year?' And after repeating the main facts continues as follows:

'This morning, in the course of my walk, I entered into conversation
with two persons of whom I made enquiry myself. They said the accused
man, a simple person, had been locked up in a high chamber,--protesting
his innocence strongly,--and troubled in his mind by the affair
altogether and the turn it was taking, had profited by the gendarme's
negligence, and thrown himself out of the window--and so died,
continuing to the last to protest as before. My presentiment of what
such a person might have to undergo was justified you see--though
I should not in any case have taken _that_ way of getting out of the
difficulty. The man added, "it was not he who committed the murder, but
the companions of the man, an Italian charcoal-burner, who owed him a
grudge, killed him, and dragged him to the field--filling his sack with
potatoes as if stolen, to give a likelihood that the field's owner had
caught him stealing and killed him,--so M. Perrier the greffier told
me." Enough of this grim story.

. . . . .

'My sister was anxious to know exactly where the body was found: "Vouz
savez la croix au sommet de la colline? A cette distance de cela!" That
is precisely where I was standing when the thought came over me.'

A passage in a subsequent letter of September 3 clearly refers to
some comment of Mrs. Fitz-Gerald's on the peculiar nature of this
presentiment:

'No--I attribute no sort of supernaturalism to my fancy about the thing
that was really about to take place. By a law of the association of
ideas--_contraries_ come into the mind as often as _similarities_--and the
peace and solitude readily called up the notion of what would most jar
with them. I have often thought of the trouble that might have befallen
me if poor Miss Smith's death had happened the night before, when we
were on the mountain alone together--or next morning when we were on the
proposed