rtnight, had
therefore no special significance for me, and my nurse, elder brother,
and godmother, who were the only three people in the house at the time,
gave strict orders that none of the servants should give me a hint of
his being dangerously ill. These instructions were carefully carried
out, and yet I dreamed three nights running--the three nights preceding
his decease--that he was dead. I was entirely devoted to my father, who
had been father and mother to me in one, and these dreams no doubt broke
the terrible shock of his death to me. How well I remember, that cold,
dreary February morning, being hastily dressed by candle-light by
strange hands, and then my dear old nurse (who had been by his bedside
all night) coming in and telling me the sad news with tears streaming
down her cheeks. It seemed no news at the moment; and yet I had spoken
of my dreams to no one, "for fear they should come true," having some
pathetic, childish notion that silence on my part might avert the
catastrophe. In all his previous and numerous illnesses I had never
dreamt that any special one was fatal.

During the next few years of school life my psychic faculty remained
absolutely in abeyance. In a fashionable school, surrounded by
chattering companions and the usual paraphernalia of school work,
classes, and masters, etc., I can, however, recall many a time when
suddenly everything around me became unreal and I alone seemed to have
any true existence; and even that was for the time merged in a rather
unpleasant dream, from which I hoped soon to wake up. This sensation was
quite distinct from the one--also well known to me in those days and
later--of having "done all this before," and knowing just what somebody
was about to say.

Probably both these sensations are common to most young people. It would
be interesting to note which of the two is the more universal.

I pass on now to the time when I was about eighteen years old, and a
constant visitor, for weeks and months at a time, in the house of my
godfather, the archdeacon of a northern diocese. His grandson, then a
young student at Oxford, of about my own age, must have been what we
should now call a very good sensitive. It was with him that I sat at my
first "table," more as a matter of amusement than anything else, and
certainly young Morton Freer treated the "spirits" in the most cavalier
fashion. They did not seem to resent this, and he could do pretty much
what he liked wit