al Filbert; I did not leave it behind me
when I left the car. Nothing of the kind happened. I had already left it
at the florist's, and that whole passage of experience which was so
vividly and circumstantially stamped in my memory that I related it four
or five times over, and would have made oath to every detail of it, was
pure invention, or, rather, it was something less positive: the reflex
of the first half of my horse-car experience, when I really did put the
picture in the corner next me, and did keep my hand on it."

"Very strange," I was beginning, but just then the door opened and Mrs.
Minver came in, and I was presented.

She gave me a distracted hand, as she said to her husband: "Have you
been telling the story about that picture again?" He was still holding
it. "Silly!"

She was a mighty pretty woman, but full of vim and fun and sense.

"It's one of the most curious freaks of memory I ever heard of, Mrs.
Minver," I said.

Then she showed that she was proud of it, though she had called him
silly. "Have you told," she demanded of her husband, "how oddly your
memory behaved about the subject of the picture, too?"

"I have again eaten that particular piece of humble-pie," Minver's
brother replied.

"Well," she said to me, "_I_ think he was simply so possessed with the
awfulness of having lost the picture that all the rest took place
prophetically, but unconsciously."

"By a species of inverted presentiment?" I suggested.

"Yes," she assented, slowly, as if the formulation were new to her, but
not unacceptable. "Something of that kind. I never heard of anybody else
having it."

Minver had got his pipe alight, and was enjoying it. "_I_ think Joe was
simply off his nut, for the time being."

IV

A CASE OF METAPHANTASMIA

The stranger was a guest of Halson's, and Halson himself was a
comparative stranger, for he was of recent election to our dining-club,
and was better known to Minver than to the rest of our little group,
though one could not be sure that he was very well known to Minver. The
stranger had been dining with Halson, and we had found the two smoking
together, with their cups of black coffee at their elbows, before the
smouldering fire in the Turkish room when we came in from dinner--my
friend Wanhope the psychologist, Rulledge the sentimentalist, Minver the
painter, and myself. It struck me for the first time that a fire on the
hearth was out of keeping with a Turkish room, but