r will. Just as the boat was about to leave the pier, a
vision of her pale face and tear-filled eyes came to me. I heard her
voice repeating, "I wish you would not go, Davy." The influence was
so strong that I dashed down the gang-plank as it was being pulled
in. The boat met with disaster, and many of the children were killed
or wounded. These premonitions have also come to me, but I do not
believe as I did when a boy that they are warnings from the dead,
although I cannot explain them, and they are never wrong; the
message is always very clear.

My mother convinced me that the dead come back by coming to me at
the time of her death--or so I believe. One night, after a long,
hard rehearsal, I went to bed, worn out, and fell into a deep sleep.
I was awakened by my mother, who stood in my bedroom and called to
me. She seemed to be clothed in white. She repeated my name over and
over--the name she called me in my boyhood: "Davy! Davy!" She told
me not to grieve--that she was dying; that she _had_ to see me. I
distinctly saw her and heard her speak.

She was in San Francisco at the time--I, in New York. After she
passed out of the room, I roused my family and told what I had heard
and seen. I said: "My mother is dead. I know she is dead;" but I
could not convince my family that I had not been dreaming. I was
very restless--could not sleep again. The next day (we were
rehearsing "Zaza") I went out for luncheon during the recess with a
member of my company. He was a very absent-minded man, and at the
table he took a telegram from his pocket which he said he had
forgotten to give me: it announced the death of my mother at the
time I had seen her in my room. I am aware that this could be
explained as thought transference, accompanied by a dream in which
my mother appeared so life-like as to make me believe the dream
real. This explanation, however, does not satisfy me. I am sure that
I did see her. Other experiences of a kindred nature served to
strengthen my belief in the naturalness of what we call the
supernatural. I decided to write a play dealing with the return of
the dead: so it followed that when I was in need of a new play for
David Warfield, I chose this subject. Slight of figure, unworldly,
simple in all his ways, Warfield was the very man to bring a message
back from the other world. Warfield has always appeared to me as a
character out of one of Grimm's Fairy Tales. He was, to my mind, the
one man to impersonat