Page:The Naturalisation of the Supernatural.pdf/151

Rh when the incident occurred in the nursery at St. Helens. The death in Penzance took place at about half-past seven on the same morning. 1em

In reply to our further inquiries, Mr. Michell wrote:

May 28th, 1894. Gwendoline is five years and four months old.

I am not aware that she has had any previous experience of the kind related to Mr. Macdonald, but that the one in question is a fact I have not the slightest doubt.

She knows the clerk at our office, and he has often conversed with her, and occasionally played with her in an ordinary way.

The impression she had was just prior to the clerk's telephoning my wife, and although the clerk did not think about my daughter missing Jack at all, yet Mrs. Michell herself was anxiously wondering what the news respecting Jack would be.

There was no one else in the nursery besides my wife and daughter, but Mrs. Michell was very deeply impressed with the matter, and then to receive the message very shortly after forced the matter upon her mind still deeper, and she told me immediately I arrived home. 1em

"Little Jack," it should be added, died from convulsions in teething.

The percipient's impression in the next case passed through three separate stages. It began with a vivid sense of an actual presence; it then assumed the form of a transparent hallucination apparently like that seen by Madame Broussiloff; in its final stage the experience, though of a very unusual type, must be classed as a pseudo-hallucination, inasmuch as it did not actually enter the percipient's field of physical vision.