to die." The child had no definite disease, but was wasting away, and
it was argued to her that the returning spring would restore the
health lost during the winter. "No," was her answer. "He was lying
asleep in my arms last night, and William" (her husband) "came to me
and said that he wanted Alf with him, but that I might keep the other
two." In vain she was assured that she had been dreaming, that it was
quite natural that she should dream about her husband, and that her
anxiety for the child had given the dream its shape. Nothing would
persuade her that she had not seen her husband, or that the
information he had given her was not true. So it was no matter of
surprise to her when in the following March her arms were empty, and a
waxen form lay lifeless in the baby's cot.

My brother and I were allowed to see him just before he was placed in
his coffin; I can see him still, so white and beautiful, with a black
spot in the middle of the fair, waxen forehead, and I remember the
deadly cold which startled me when I was told to kiss my little
brother. It was the first time that I had touched Death. That black
spot made a curious impression on me, and long afterwards, asking what
had caused it, I was told that at the moment after his death my mother
had passionately kissed the baby brow. Pathetic thought, that the
mother's kiss of farewell should have been marked by the first sign of
corruption on the child's face!

I do not mention these stories because they are in any fashion
remarkable or out of the way, but only to show that the sensitiveness
to impressions other than physical ones, that was a marked feature in
my own childhood, was present also in the family to which I belonged.
For the physical nature is inherited from parents, and sensitiveness
to psychic impressions is a property of the physical body; in our