ing of wood preparatory to the formation of the camp, as in Miss
Angus's crystal picture.[15] The sceptical Mrs. Cockburn heard of these
coincidences, and an idea occurred to her. She wrote to her daughter, who
has been mentioned, and asked whether, on Wednesday, February 2, she had
been lying on a sofa in her bed-room, with bare feet. The young lady
confessed that it was indeed so;[16] and, when she heard how the fact came
to be known, expressed herself with some warmth on the abuse of glass
balls, which tend to rob life of its privacy.
In this case the _prima facie_ aspect of things is that a thought
of Mr. Bissett's about his stockbroker, _dulce ridentem_, somehow
reflected itself into Miss Angus's mind by way of the glass ball, and
was interrupted by a thought of Mrs. Cockburn's, as to her daughter. But
how these thoughts came to display the unknown facts concerning the
garden by the river, the felling of trees for a camp, and the bare feet,
is a question about which it is vain to theorise.[17]
On the vanishing of the jungle scene there appeared a picture of a man in
a dark undress uniform, beside a great bay, in which were ships of war.
Wooden huts, as in a plague district, were on shore. Mr. Bissett asked,
'What is the man's expression?' 'He looks as if he had been giving a lot
of last orders.' Then appeared 'a place like a hospital, with five or six
beds--no, berths: it is a ship. Here is the man again.' He was minutely
described, one peculiarity being the way in which his hair grew--or,
rather, did not grow--on his temples.
Miss Angus now asked, 'Where is my little lady?'--meaning the lady of the
twirling parasol and _staccato_ walk. 'Oh, I've left off thinking of her,'
said Mrs. Bissett, who had been thinking of, and recognised in the
officer in undress uniform, her brother, the man with the singular hair,
whose face, in fact, had been scarred in that way by an encounter with a
tiger. He was expected to sail from Bombay, but news of his setting
forth has not been received (February 10) at the moment when this is
written.[18]
In these Indian cases, 'thought transference' may account for the
correspondence between the figures seen by Miss Angus and the ideas in the
mind of Mr. and Mrs. Bissett. But the hypothesis of thought transference,
while it would cover the wooden huts at Bombay (Mrs. Bissett knowing that
her brother was about to leave that place), can scarcely explain the scene
in the garden by the r
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