t,
which, as you may imagine, my dear, is exceedingly annoying to me; but
some of them do possess to a considerable extent what the Scotch call
second sight, that is to say, the power of foreseeing events in the
future. Of that I am morally certain; I have seen proofs of it over and
over again. For example, once an old fakir, whom I had cured of a badly
ulcerated limb, came up just as I was starting on a shooting expedition.

"'Do not go out today,' he said. 'I foresee evil for you. I saw you last
night brought back badly wounded.'

"'But if I don't go your dream will come wrong,' I said.

"He shook his head.

"'You will go in spite of what I say,' he said; 'and you will suffer,
and others too;' and he looked at a group of shikaris, who were standing
together, ready to make a start.

"'How many men are there?' he said.

"'Why, six of course,' I replied.

"'I see only three,' he said, 'and three dull spots. One of those I
see is holding his matchlock on his shoulder, another is examining his
priming, the third is sitting down by the tire. Those three will come
back at the end of the day; the other three will not return alive.'

"I felt rather uncomfortable, but I wasn't, as I said to myself--I was a
good deal younger then, my dear--such a fool as to be deterred from what
promised to be a good day's sport by such nonsense as this; and I went.

"We were going after a rogue elephant that had been doing a lot of
damage among the natives' plantations. We found him, and a savage brute
he turned out to be. He moved just as I fired, and though I hit him, it
was not on the fatal spot, and he charged right down among us. He caught
the very three men the fakir said were doomed, and dashed the life out
of them; then he came at me. The bearer had run off with my second gun,
and he seized me and flung me up in the air.

"I fell in a tree, but broke three of my ribs and one of my arms;
fortunately, though the beast tried to get at me, I was out of his
reach, and the tree was too strong for him to knock down. Then another
man who was with me came up and killed him, and they got me down and
carried me back, and I was weeks before I was about again. That was
something more than a coincidence, I think. There were some twenty men
out with us, and just the four he had pointed out were hurt, and no
others.

"I have seen scores of other cases in which these predictions have
come true, especially in cases of disease; though I grant