as met in the yard by his
mother. She was wearing a thin cap on her head which he had never seen
her wear before. He remarked in regard to it. She raised the cap and
doing so revealed the remains of a long ugly gash on the side of her
head. She then said that some months before, naming the time, she had
gone into the back yard and had picked up a heavy crooked stick having a
sharp end, to throw it out of the way, and in throwing it, it had struck
a wire clothesline immediately above her head and had rebounded with
such force that it had given her the deep scalp wound of which she was
speaking. On unpacking his bag he looked into his diary and found that
the time she had mentioned corresponded exactly with the strange and
unusual occurrence to himself as they were floating down the
Mississippi.

The mother and son were very near one to the other, close in their
sympathies, and there can be but little doubt that the thoughts of the
mother as she was struck went out, and perhaps _went strongly out_, to
her boy who was now away from home. He, being sensitively organised and
intimately related to her in thought, and alone at the time,
undoubtedly got, if not her thought, at least the effects of her
thought, as it went out to him under these peculiar and tense
conditions.

There are scores if not hundreds of occurrences of a more or less
similar nature that have occurred in the lives of others, many of them
well authenticated. How many of us, even, have had the experience of
suddenly thinking of a friend of whom we have not thought for weeks or
months, and then entirely unexpectedly meeting or hearing from this same
friend. How many have had the experience of writing a friend, one who
has not been written to or heard from for a long time, and within a day
or two getting a letter from that friend--the letters "crossing," as we
are accustomed to say. There are many other experiences or facts of a
similar nature, and many of them exceedingly interesting, that could be
related did space permit. These all indicate to me that thoughts are not
mere indefinite things but that thoughts are forces, that they go out,
and that every distinct, clear-cut thought has, or may have, an
influence of some type.

Thought transference, which is now unquestionably an established fact,
notwithstanding much chicanery that is still to be found in connection
with it, is undoubtedly to be explained through the fact that _thoughts
are forces_. A pos