tion the story,
and was much laughed at as a "superstitious little creature, to think
twice of such nonsense." "Of course, everyone had been mistaken in
supposing they heard wheels or horses' hoofs--nothing could be simpler!"

And yet before I left that house, three weeks later, all the newspapers
were full of long obituary notices of the Marquis of Hastings. These
were so interesting that my friend's husband had reached the second
long column in _The Times_ before any of us remembered my story, which
had been treated with so much contempt. It suddenly flashed across my
mind: "Owen! Remember the carriage and pair and how you laughed at me!"
They were forced to confess "_it was certainly rather odd_," the usual
refuge of the psychically destitute!

A shake of the kaleidoscope, and I see another incident before me of
more personal interest.

At the time of the outbreak of the Afghan War, in the autumn of 1878, I
was living with very old friends in Oxford. My brother of the Ram Din
incident was once more in India, and had been Military Secretary for
some years at Lahore to Sir Robert Egerton, who was at that time
Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab.

When the war broke out, my brother, of course, went off to join his
regiment for active service; but at the time of my experience it was
impossible that he could have reached the seat of war, and I knew this
well.

I was in excellent spirits about him, for he had been through many
campaigns, and loved active service, as all good soldiers do. Moreover,
I had just read a charming letter which Sir Robert Egerton had sent him
on resigning his appointment as Military Secretary to take up more
active duty to his country.

Yet it was just at this juncture--when, humanly speaking, there was no
cause for any special anxiety--that I woke up one morning with the
gloomiest and most miserable forebodings about this special brother.
Nothing of the kind had ever occurred to me before, though he had been
through many campaigns in India, China, Abyssinia, and elsewhere.

It was an overwhelming conviction of some great and definite disaster
to him, and my friends in vain tried to argue me out of such an
unreasonable terror by pointing out, truly enough, that he could not
possibly be within the zone of danger at that time. I could only
repeat: "I _know_ that something terrible has happened to him,
wherever he is. It may not be death, but it is some terrible
calamity."

I spent the day i