nformant was the fellow-traveller
himself: he told me the story in presence of his wife, who religiously
attested its accuracy. You will meet with similar stories, implicitly
believed, in every society you go into, varying in their
circumstances--a ghost being sometimes put in the place of a dream, and
sometimes a vague but strong mental impression, a foreboding only. But
the common point exists in all, that all intimation of the death of an
absent acquaintance has been in one or another way insinuated into the
mind of his friend about the time the event really took place. Instances
of this kind, it will be found, are far too numerous to permit one
off-hand to conclude that they have arisen from accident; that the
connexion between the event and its anticipation and foreshadowing has
been merely coincidence.

If you ask me how I would otherwise explain these stories, I will
frankly avow, that it appears to me neither impossible, nor absurdly
improbable, that the soul, or the nervous system, as you like, of the
dying man, should have put itself into direct communication with the
thoughts of his absent friend.

Ah, ah! the last touch of the vampyr theory again! You were then very
modest about your hobby, and pretended not to know him, and passed him
off as my beast, and now you daringly mount him yourself, and expect to
be allowed to pace him before us, in that easy and confident style, as
if he were some well-known roadster of Stewart's, or Ferriar's, or
Hibbert's, or Abercromby's. Now shall we shortly see you thrown, or run
away with, or led by some will-o'-the-wisp into a bottomless slough.

Well, that at all events will amuse you.

But in the mean time did you ever hear of the Wynyard ghost? A late
General Wynyard and the late Sir John Colebrook, when young men, were
serving in Canada. One day--it was daylight--Mr Wynyard and Mr Colebrook
both saw a figure pass through the room in which they were sitting,
which Mr Wynyard recognised as a brother then far away. One of them
walked to the door, and looked out upon the landing-place; but the
stranger was not there, and a servant, who was on the stairs, had seen
nobody pass out. In time the news arrived, that Mr Wynyard's brother had
died about the time of the visit of the apparition. Of this story, which
I had heard narrated, I inquired the truth of two military men, each a
General Wynyard, near relations of the ghost-seer of that name. They
told me it was so narrated