examining magistrate were driving one fine
spring day to an inquest. The examining magistrate, a man of five
and thirty, looked dreamily at the horses and said:

"There is a great deal that is enigmatic and obscure in nature; and
even in everyday life, doctor, one must often come upon phenomena
which are absolutely incapable of explanation. I know, for instance,
of several strange, mysterious deaths, the cause of which only
spiritualists and mystics will undertake to explain; a clear-headed
man can only lift up his hands in perplexity. For example, I know
of a highly cultured lady who foretold her own death and died without
any apparent reason on the very day she had predicted. She said
that she would die on a certain day, and she did die."

"There's no effect without a cause," said the doctor. "If there's
a death there must be a cause for it. But as for predicting it
there's nothing very marvellous in that. All our ladies--all our
females, in fact--have a turn for prophecies and presentiments."

"Just so, but my lady, doctor, was quite a special case. There was
nothing like the ladies' or other females' presentiments about her
prediction and her death. She was a young woman, healthy and clever,
with no superstitions of any sort. She had such clear, intelligent,
honest eyes; an open, sensible face with a faint, typically Russian
look of mockery in her eyes and on her lips. There was nothing of
the fine lady or of the female about her, except--if you like--
her beauty! She was graceful, elegant as that birch tree; she had
wonderful hair. That she may be intelligible to you, I will add,
too, that she was a person of the most infectious gaiety and
carelessness and that intelligent, good sort of frivolity which is
only found in good-natured, light-hearted people with brains. Can
one talk of mysticism, spiritualism, a turn for presentiment, or
anything of that sort, in this case? She used to laugh at all that."

The doctor's chaise stopped by a well. The examining magistrate and
the doctor drank some water, stretched, and waited for the coachman
to finish watering the horses.

"Well, what did the lady die of?" asked the doctor when the chaise
was rolling along the road again.

"She died in a strange way. One fine day her husband went in to her
and said that it wouldn't be amiss to sell their old coach before
the spring and to buy something rather newer and lighter instead,
and that it might be as well to change the l