ave read of such things. His thoughts were with me. His
vision came to me. Oh, my John, my dear, dear, lost John!"

She broke out suddenly into a storm of weeping, and I led her down into
her cabin, where I left her with her sorrow. That night a brisk breeze
blew up from the east, and in the evening of the next day we passed the
two islets of Los Desertos, and dropped anchor at sundown in the Bay of
Funchal. The _Eastern Star_ lay no great distance from us, with the
quarantine flag flying from her main, and her Jack half-way up her peak.

"You see," said Mrs. Vansittart quickly. She was dry-eyed now, for she
had known how it would be.

That night we received permission from the authorities to move on board
the _Eastern Star_. The captain, Hines, was waiting upon deck with
confusion and grief contending upon his bluff face as he sought for
words with which to break this heavy tidings, but she took the story
from his lips.

"I know that my husband is dead," she said. "He died yesterday night,
about ten o'clock, in hospital at Madeira, did he not?"

The seaman stared aghast. "No, marm, he died eight days ago at sea, and
we had to bury him out there, for we lay in a belt of calm, and could
not say when we might make the land."

Well, those are the main facts about the death of John Vansittart, and
his appearance to his wife somewhere about lat. 35 N. and long. 15 W. A
clearer case of a wraith has seldom been made out, and since then it has
been told as such, and put into print as such, and endorsed by a learned
society as such, and so floated off with many others to support the
recent theory of telepathy. For myself, I hold telepathy to be proved,
but I would snatch this one case from amid the evidence, and say that I
do not think that it was the wraith of John Vansittart, but John
Vansittart himself whom we saw that night leaping into the moonlight out
of the depths of the Atlantic. It has ever been my belief that some
strange chance--one of those chances which seem so improbable and yet so
constantly occur--had becalmed us over the very spot where the man had
been buried a week before. For the rest, the surgeon tells me that the
leaden weight was not too firmly fixed, and that seven days bring about
changes which fetch a body to the surface. Coming from the depth to
which the weight would have sunk it, he explains that it might well
attain such a velocity as to carry it clear of the water. Such is my own
explanation