baby's illness.

"The next morning I was sitting by the drawing-room fire with baby on my
lap. The doctor came in, looked at him, sounded his chest, and
pronounced him much better. As he was a friend of the family, he sat
down on the other side of the fireplace and was chatting in an ordinary
way, when he suddenly jumped up with an exclamation, 'Why, what does
this mean?' and took the child from my arms quite dead!

"For two years we saw nothing more of the white bird, and we had moved
to another place.

"One day I was in my room, and my two little girls, aged six and eight,
were standing at the window watching a kitten in the garden, when
suddenly the youngest cried out:

"'Oh, mamma! Look at that great white bird,' putting her hands as if to
catch it, exactly in the way it flies round one.

"I saw nothing, and the elder child said, 'Don't be silly, Jessie; there
is no bird.'

"'But there is,' said the child. 'Don't you see? There, look! There it
is!'

"I looked at my watch. It was twenty minutes past three.

"Two days after we received the news that a niece of mine had died at
twenty minutes past three. The children had never known anything of the
former appearances, as we had never talked about it before them. We have
seen nothing since of the bird, but have for some years had no death in
the family."

So runs the article in the _Occult Review_, and I can corroborate it
with similar experiences that have happened to my friends and to me.

Some years ago, for instance, a great friend of my wife's died, and on
the day of the funeral a large bird tried to fly in at the window of the
room where the corpse lay; while, shortly afterwards, an exactly similar
bird visited the window of my wife's and my room in a house, several
hundreds of miles away. If it was only a coincidence, it was a very
extraordinary one.

Then again, this spring, just before the death of one of my wife's
relatives, a large bird flew violently against the window-pane behind
which my wife was sitting--an incident that had never happened to her in
that house before.

Undoubtedly, spirits in the guise of birds--most probably they are the
phantasms of birds that have actually once lived on the material
plane--are the messengers of death.

_A Case of Bird haunting in East Russia_

Some years ago the neighbourhood of Orskaia, in East Russia, was roused
by an affair of a very remarkable nature. The body of a handsome young
peasant woman,