knock followed just as he was
withdrawing the bolt, but on looking out not a single person was to be
seen, though it was clear moonlight, and nothing to prevent him seeing
a long way off. Next post brought a letter informing him that a near
relation in London had died just at the time the knocking alarmed him
and his family, for they too heard the startling sounds. The disturbed
persons firmly believed that, in one way or another, the knockings had
reference to their friend's death.

A few years afterwards, the same gentleman, sitting one night at
twelve o'clock with a sick brother, heard a noise, as of the driving
of nails into a coffin, in the workshop of an undertaker, who was a
neighbour. The gentleman thought it was very unkind of the undertaker,
an intimate acquaintance of the sick person, to disturb him. As soon
as the noise of nail-driving ceased, other and more disagreeable
sounds reached his ears. The street door was opened, and, as he
thought, two or three men went upstairs with a coffin. He naturally
suspected that all this was a forerunner of his brother's death; and
so it turned out to be. The invalid died next day at noon. Those who
live in our time may think that the gentleman was insane, and that
what he heard resulted from him having a diseased brain. If he was
labouring under delusions, others must have been deranged too; for it
was not uncommon in those days for an undertaker and his family to be
advised of an early order to make a coffin by the sound of planes and
hammers at work in the workshop. Gravediggers were not without their
early notices of funerals. Sometimes the church bell would toll at
midnight, the graveyard gate would be thrown open by unseen hands, and
a living form be seen to enter alone; or it might be that the whole
funeral cortege which would appear in the flesh a few days later,
could be observed in spirit in the dreary hours of night. If the
deceased person had lived a good and holy life, his spectre appeared
in a pleasant, comely form; but if his career was a wicked one, he
passed in a hideous shape, probably attended by infernal spirits.

CHAPTER XLII.

Ornithomancy--Mohammed's Pigeons--A Gigantic
Fowl--Cock-crowing--Sacred Geese saving a
City--Phenomenon at Rome before Caesar's Death--Young
Swallows--Virtue of a Goose's Tongue--Crows'
Hearts--Divination by means of a Sieve--Detection
of Crime--Capnomancy--Catoptromancy--Dactylioma