"Two or three days afterwards, I asked the landlady to get me a daily paper, feeling a longing to read something; and, at my landlady's urgent entreaty not to tire myself, I said that I would only look at the births, deaths and marriages. There I saw the announcement of the death of Mrs. A. at the seaside, on the very day when, as I thought, I had passed her in her carriage, near London.

"I afterwards learned from her relations that she had died after a very short illness, at 6 p.m. on that day, and that she had lain in a state of unconsciousness for some hours before her death. It could not have been much less than two hours before her death - that is during the time when she lay unconscious - that I saw her. "E. L. S".

We find the announcement of the death in three London daily papers for August 30th, 1881.

In conversation, Miss S. stated that she had never been the subject of any hallucination. She is short-sighted, but wears suitable glasses, and was wearing them on this occasion. No corroborative testimony can be obtained. The landlady was very old, and very unlikely, even if now alive, to remember so trifling an incident as Miss S.'s question about the supposed callers; and Miss S.'s sister was absent from home when the inquiry was made at her house.

This might conceivably have been a case of mistaken identity. But it would have been an extraordinary one; and the sealskin jacket in August would have been as odd a costume for any real person as Miss S. conceived it to be for her friend. It is worth mentioning that visions of horses and carriages are a known species of purely subjective hallucination;l and it is therefore not as strange as it might appear that a telepathic hallucination should assume this elaborate form. But more important is the appearance of a second human figure - that of the dying friend's child. I have already (p. 266) pointed to a similar feature in one of the "borderland" cases as an indication that telepathic percepts, in their sensory character, are really projections from within. I may now point out, as a fresh instance of parallelism between telepathic and casual subjective phantasms, the extreme rarity of the cases in which a second figure thus appears. In my large collection of subjective hallucinations of vision - putting out of the question the peculiar illusions hypnagogiques (pp. 299-300) - I find only seven cases, that is, less than 3 per cent, presenting more than one human figure;2 three of which occurred to percipients who were in bed, while in two others the percipients were extremely young.

And among the telepathic examples in this book, I find almost exactly the same proportion.

As further illustrating the construction of the phantasm from material which the percipient's mind supplies, I may mention a point in case 184. On the day when little Isidore left Paris for London, his hair was cut very short; and the long "fringe," which was removed, could not (the narrator says) have grown to its customary length in the month which followed before the death.3 But, as he adds, "In my memory his image still preserved the usual features, with the fringe over his forehead; and on the morning when the vision awoke me, I saw him with the fringe over his forehead."4 In another "borderland" case, No. 495, where the phantasm of a dying female relative appeared, the dress" outdoor walking costume, the bonnet being a prominent part of it" - was that in which the percipient had last seen her, nine years previously; in a waking case, No. 555, where the phantasm represented the percipient's mother, "the attire was the same in which I had last seen her several years before"; and in another waking case, No. 645, the phantasm appeared in a dress which the agent had not worn or seen for nine months, but which she had been wearing during the weeks when the percipient had last been in her company. [The three cases last referred to were in the Supplement, and are not in the present edition. - Ed].

1 Cf. Dr. C. M. Smith's case, p. 322, note. Occasionally a subjective experience takes a still more elaborate form. Thus an informant who at one time had a slight tendency to visual hallucination, describes seeing, when quite awake, the details of a complete funeral procession.

2 See again Dr. Smith's case, p. 322, note, and Mrs. Hunter's case described in § 4, above. Other telepathic instances are Nos. 168 and 195; besides the cases in which a complete scene with several figures has been represented, as No. 299. In case 185 there was the sense of a second person's presence, but the hallucination was of one figure only.

3Mr. Keulemans' statement that his little boy's fringe could not have grown to its usual length in a month might be questioned. But on my pointing this out to him, he explained that (being struck by the fact that the hair, as he saw it in his vision, was just as he had been accustomed to see it) he had expressly asked his mother-in-law what was the state of the child's hair at the time of his death; and she had said that he "had very little hair - that it grew straight upright, and that he had no fringe when he died." Mr. Keulemans has no difficulty in accepting this description, as he has recently made experiments with two of his children, aged four and six, with a result that entirely accords with it. The rate at which hair grows seems to differ greatly in different people.

4 It may be remembered that Mr. Keulemans had in the evening a second vision of his child, which was treated above as a mere recrudescence of the morning's hallucination. Mr. Keulemans himself, however, is inclined to explain it otherwise. His grounds are that this second vision, which took place in the bright gaslight of the billiard-room, represented the boy's figure, in an attitude suggestive of death, enclosed as it were in a dark cellar or vault, with a little window in it; and he afterwards found that at that hour the dead body had been taken to a mortuary, which he afterwards saw, and which vividly recalled the visionary scene. (I attach more importance to these details than I should otherwise do, on account of the care which Mr. Keulemans has brought to bear on the study of his own visual impressions, and of his training in habits of accurate observation.) He suggests that this second vision was due to a telepathic impulse from his wife's mother, who had the body.