292
A SPECTRAL WARNING
A respectable American paper publishes a story of a clairvoyant prevision of death. One Martin Delehaute, employed in a steam sawmill, saw one night at ten o’clock, not far from his house, a man on a white horse, standing perfectly still and having his arm extended. He went to see who it was, when it vanished into air. He took this to be the foreboding of some evil to occur either to himself or his family. He told his wife all about his vision, and on the next day would not go into the swamp to cut logs as he had done before. On the following day he was sent for, but did not like to go on account of having a presentiment that something was to happen to him on that day. However, he took his axe and went to the chopping, and on finding nobody there he turned back toward home. He met, however, a Mr. Tancrede Mayex by whom he was persuaded, despite a foreboding of disaster to himself, to return to the jungle and assist in felling a tree. The work was completed in safety and the tree fell, but was caught in the branches of another tree, and in giving one more blow with the axe to free it, the tree suddenly twisted around, the roots struck the unfortunate man and mortally injured him. The strangest fact is now to be told. At precisely ten o’clock a.m., thirty-six hours after Mr. Delehaute saw the afore-mentioned vision, Mr. A. E. Rabelais, seated on a white horse, stopped at precisely the same spot and in the same attitude where Mr. D. had seen the vision, and gave Mrs. D. the startling information that her husband was very near killed, and then hastily rode off in search of Dr. Cullum. Dr. Cullum arrived, but the unfortunate man was beyond the reach
293
of medical skill and died at sundown of the same day. This is one of those cases one constantly meets with, where the previsionary faculty of the mind catches the coming event, but vainly tries to compel the dull reason to take warning. Almost everyone, even those who are quite ignorant of psychological science, has had these premonitions. With some they are of every day occurrence and extend to the most trifling events, though it is but rarely that they are heeded. Prevision is a faculty as easy to cultivate as memory, strange as the assertion may appear to sciolists.