f common-sense. He completes his fallacy by
saying, "It is not much more wonderful than that a person whom we had
no reason to expect should appear to us at the very moment we had been
thinking or speaking of him". But Lord Brougham had _not_ been
speaking or thinking of G---; "there had been nothing to call him to
my recollection," he says. To give his logic any value, he should
constantly when (as far as he knew) awake, have had dreams that
"shocked" him. Then _one_ coincidence would have had no assignable
cause save ordinary accident.

If Lord Brougham fabled in 1799 or in 1862, he did so to make a
"sensation". And then he tried to undo it by arguing that his
experience was a thoroughly commonplace affair.

We now give a very old story, "The Dying Mother". If the reader will
compare it with Mr. Cleave's case, "An Astral Body," in this chapter,
he will be struck by the resemblance. Mr. Cleave and Mrs. Goffe were
both in a trance. Both wished to see persons at a distance. Both
saw, and each was seen, Mrs. Goffe by her children's nurse; Mr. Cleave
by the person whom he wished to see, but _not_ by a small boy also
present.

THE DYING MOTHER {101}

"Mary, the wife of John Goffe of Rochester, being afflicted with a
long illness, removed to her father's house at West Mulling, about
nine miles from her own. There she died on 4th June, this present
year, 1691.

"The day before her departure (death) she grew very impatiently
desirous to see her two children, whom she had left at home to the
care of a nurse. She prayed her husband to 'hire a horse, for she
must go home and die with the children'. She was too ill to be moved,
but 'a minister who lives in the town was with her at ten o'clock that
night, to whom she expressed good hopes in the mercies of God and a
willingness to die'. 'But' said she, 'it is my misery that I cannot
see my children.'

"Between one and two o'clock in the morning, she fell into a trance.
One, widow Turner, who watched with her that night, says that her eyes
were open and fixed and her jaw fallen. Mrs. Turner put her hand upon
her mouth and nostrils, but could perceive no breath. She thought her
to be in a fit; and doubted whether she were dead or alive.

"The next morning the dying woman told her mother that she had been at
home with her children. . . . 'I was with them last night when I was
asleep.'

"The nurse at Rochester, widow Alexander by name, affirms, and says
she wi