723. In this connection I may refer again to Mrs. Storie's dream of the death of her brother in a railway accident, given in Chapter IV (Sleep). (427). While I think that Gurney was right - in the state of the evidence at the time Phantasms of the Living was written - in doing his best to bring this incident under the head of telepathic clairvoyance, I yet feel that the knowledge since gained makes it impossible for me to adhere to that view. I cannot regard the visionary scene as wholly reflected from the mind of the dying man. I cannot think, in the first place, that the vision of Mr. Johnstone, - interpolated with seeming irrelevance among the details of the disaster, - did only by accident coincide with the fact that that gentle-man really was in the train, and with the further fact that it was he who communicated the fact of Mr. Hunter's death to Mr. and Mrs. Storie. I must suppose that the communicating intelligence was aware of Mr. John-stone's presence, and at least guessed that upon him (as a clergyman) that task would naturally fall. Nor can I pass over as purely symbolic so im-portant a part of the vision as the second figure, and the scrap of conversa-tion, which seemed to be half heard.

I therefore consider that the case falls among those where a friend recently departed appears in company of some other friend, dead some time before.

724. We have thus seen the spirit occupied shortly after death with various duties or engagements, small or great, which it has incurred during life on earth. Such ties seem to prompt or aid its action upon its old sur-roundings. And here an important reflection occurs. Can we prepare such a tie for the departing spirit? Can we create for it some welcome and helpful train of association which may facilitate the self-manifestation which many souls appear to desire? I believe that we can to some extent do this. At an early stage of our collection, Edmund Gurney was struck by the unexpectedly large proportion of cases where the percipient informed us that there had been a compact between himself and the deceased person that whichever passed away first should try to appear to the other.

"Considering," he adds, "what an extremely small number of persons make such a compact, compared with those who do not, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that its existence has a certain efficacy".

The cases recorded in Phantasms of the Living are such as fell, or may have fallen, within twelve hours of the death; otherwise they would not have been introduced into that work. It will, of course, occur to the reader that since the especial object of that compact is to assure the surviving friend that the deceased person has safely traversed the gate of death, its fulfilment affords some presumption that he is not merely approaching that gate, but feels that he has passed it. On the other hand, Gurney remarks, that "considering how often spontaneous telepathy acts without any conscious set of the distant mind towards the person impressed, it is safer to refer the phenomenon to the same sort of blind movements as seem sometimes at supreme crises to evoke a response out of memories and affinities that have long lapsed from consciousness; on which view the efficacy of the compact may quite as readily be conceived to depend on its latent place in the percipient's mind as in the agent's".

Since these words were written the general trend of the evidence has somewhat changed; and it may be well briefly to refer to the compact-cases in Phantasms of the Living, considering how far they seem to indicate ante-mortem ox post-mortem communication.