himself about my dying or my living. There stood the uncanny Jerusha as
pledge that my informant knew what she was talking about. I left the
office with an uneasy sinking at the heart. There was a coffin-store
near by, and I remember the peculiar interest with which I studied the
quilting of the satin lining, and the peculiar crawling sensation which
crept to my fingers' ends.

Determined not to be unnecessarily alarmed, I spent the next three weeks
in testing the communication. I visited one more medium in Boston, two
in New York, one in New Haven, one in Philadelphia, and one in a little
out-of-the-way Connecticut village, where I spent a night, and did not
know a soul. None of these people, I am confident, had ever seen my face
or heard, my name before.

It was a circumstance calculated at least to arrest attention, that
these seven people, each unknown to the others, and without concert with
the others, repeated the ugly message which had sought me out through
the happy summer morning in Washington Street. There was no hesitation,
no doubt, no contradiction. I could not trip them or cross-question them
out of it. Unerring, assured, and consistent, the fiat went forth:--

"On the second of May, at one o'clock in the afternoon, you will pass
out of the body."

I would not have believed them if I could have helped myself, I sighed
for the calm days when I had laughed at medium and prophet, and sneered
at ghost and rapping. I took lodgings in Philadelphia, locked my doors,
and paced my rooms all day and half the night, tortured by my thoughts,
and consulting books of medicine to discover what evidence I could by
any possibility give of unsuspected disease. I was at that time
absolutely well and strong; absolutely well and strong I was forced to
confess myself, after having waded through Latin adjectives and
anatomical illustrations enough to make a ghost of Hercules. I devoted
two days to researches in genealogical pathology, and was rewarded for
my pains by discovering myself to be the possessor of one great-aunt who
had died of heart disease at the advanced age of two months.

Heart disease, then, I settled upon. The alternative was accident.
"Which will it be?" I asked in vain. Upon this point my friends the
mediums held a delicate reserve. "The Influences were confusing, and
they were not prepared to state with exactness."

"Why _don't_ you come home?" my wife wrote in distress and perplexity.
"You promised t