delivering messages from Socrates, Ben Franklin and Shakespeare.
Besides the physical demonstrations, there were all sorts of psychical
intimations from the world which we've now abolished."

"Not permanently, perhaps," I suggested.

"Well, that remains to be seen," Minver said. "It was this sort of
thing which my people valued above the other. Perhaps they were
exclusive in their tastes, and did not care for an occultism which the
crowd could share with them; though this is a conjecture too long
after the fact to have much value. As far as I can now remember, they
used to talk of the double presence of living persons, like their
being where they greatly wished to be as well as where they really
were; of clairvoyance; of what we call mind-transference, now; of
weird coincidences of all kinds; of strange experiences of their own
and of others; of the participation of animals in these experiences,
like the testimony of cats and dogs to the presence of invisible
spirits; of dreams that came true, or came near coming true; and,
above everything, of forebodings and presentiments.

"I dare say they didn't always talk of such things, and I'm giving
possibly a general impression from a single instance; everything
remembered of childhood is as if from large and repeated occurrence.
But it must have happened more than once, for I recall that when it
came to presentiments my aunt broke it up, perhaps once only. My
cousin used to get very sleepy on the rug before the fire, and her
mother would carry her off to bed, very cross and impatient of being
kissed good night, while I was left to the brunt of the occult alone.
I could not go with my aunt and cousin, and I folded myself in my
mother's skirt, where I sat at her feet, and listened in an anguish of
drowsy terror. The talk would pass into my dreams, and the dreams
would return into the talk; and I would suffer a sort of double
nightmare, waking and sleeping."

"Poor little devil!" Rulledge broke out. "It's astonishing how people
will go on before children, and never think of the misery they're
making for them."

"I believe my mother thought of it," Minver returned, "but when that
sort of talk began, the witchery of it was probably too strong for
her. 'It held her like a two years' child'; I was eight that winter. I
don't know how long my suffering had gone on, when my aunt came back
and seemed to break up the talk. It had got to presentiments, and,
whether they knew that t