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Dreams and Dream Stories by Anna Bonus Kingsford
page 91 of 288 (31%)
connectedly and with enthusiasm. I was about to reassure him in
regard to my own philosophical convictions, the soundness of which he
seemed to question, when his voice sank again, and he added earnestly:--

"I tell you I have seen my boy, and that I know he lives,--not in
any far-off sphere beyond the grave, but here on earth, among living
men! Twice since his loss I have returned from England to seek
him, in obedience to the vision, but in vain, and I have gone back
home to dream the same dream. But--only last week--I heard a
wonderful story. It was told me by a friend who is a great traveler,
and who has but just returned from a lengthened tour in the south.
I met him at my club, `by accident,' as unthinking persons say.
He told me that there exists, buried away out of common sight and
knowledge, in the bosom of the Swiss Alps, a little village whose
inhabitants possess, in varying degrees, a marvellous and priceless
faculty. Almost all the dwellers in this village are mutually
related, either bearing the same ancestral name, or being branches
from one original stock. The founder of this community was a blind
man, who, by some unexplained good fortune, acquired or became
endowed with the psychic faculty called 'second sight,' or clairvoyance.
This faculty, it appears, is now the hereditary property of the
whole village, more developed in the blind man's immediate heirs
than in his remoter relatives; but, strange to say, it is a faculty
which, for a reason connected with the history of its acquirement,
they enjoy only once a year, and that is on Christmas Eve. I know
well," continued Mr. St. Aubyn, "all you have it in your mind to
say. Doubtless, you would hint to me that the narrator of the tale
was amusing himself with my credulity; or that these Alpine villagers,
if they exist, are not clairvoyants, but charlatans trading on the
folly of the curious, or even that the whole story is a chimera
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