h other to allow one
another credit for being fairly level-headed. Then I thought, now if I
tell her what I saw she may perhaps be acted upon by suggestion and
imagine a resemblance between the unknown figure and some acquaintance
of hers, so I will not begin by telling her of the vision, but will
first ask if she knows any one answering to the description, and give
her the reason afterwards. I therefore took a suitable opportunity of
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
the psychic action took place at a long distance from the physical body.

From these personal experiences, as well as from many well authenticated
cases recorded by other writers, I should be inclined to infer that the
psychic a