asking her if she knew any such person, describing the figure to her as
accurately as I could.

Her look of surprise grew as I went on, and when I had finished she
explained with astonishment: "Why, Mr. Troward, where _could_ you have
seen my mother? She is an invalid, and I am certain you have never seen
her, and yet you have described her most accurately."

Then I told her what I had seen. She asked what I thought was the
explanation of the appearance, and the only explanation I could give
was, that I supposed she was on the look-out for a post and paid us a
preliminary visit to see whether ours would suit her, and that, being
naturally interested in her welfare, her mother had accompanied her.
Perhaps you will say: "What came of it?" Well, nothing "came of it," nor
did anything "come" of my psychic visits to Edinburgh and Lanercost
Abbey. Such occurrences seem to be simple facts in Nature which, though
on some occasions connected with premonitions of more or less
importance, are by no means necessarily so. They are the functioning of
certain faculties which we all possess, but of the nature of which we as
yet know very little.

It will be noticed that in the first of these three cases I myself was
the person seen, though unaware of the fact. In the last I was the
percipient, but the persons seen by me were unconscious of their visit;
and in the second case I was conscious of my presence at a place which I
had never heard of, and which I visited some time after. In two of these
cases, therefore, the persons, making the psychic visit, were not aware
of having done so, while in the third, a memory of what had been seen
was retained. But all three cases have this in common, that the psychic
visit was not the result of an act of conscious volition, and also, that