I had run barefooted across the open space where my
tents were pitched, very much to the astonishment of the sentry on
guard, but I returned to my tent without speaking to him. I wrote to
my father. I wished to know whether there were any hope for me. He
wrote back to me these words: 'Too late, my dear son--on the very day
of the vision you describe to me, A. was married'."
The colonel did not keep his determination not to marry, for his Life
is edited by his daughter, who often heard her father mention the
incident, "precisely in the same manner, and exactly as it is in the
book". {103}
If thinking of friends and lovers, lost or dead, could bring their
forms and voices before the eye and ear of flesh, there would be a
world of hallucinations around us. "But it wants heaven-sent moments
for this skill," and few bridal nights send a vision and a voice to
the bed of a wakeful lover far away.
Stories of this kind, appearances of the living or dying really at a
distance, might be multiplied to any extent. They are all capable of
explanation, if we admit the theory of telepathy, of a message sent by
an unknown process from one living man's mind to another.
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