returning, impress on the physical brain what it has experienced.  The very fact that she asked to be taken to the chapel is significant, showing that she was picking up a memory of a previous going from that spot to the grave; she could only find the grave if she started from the place from which she had started before.  Another proof of this ultra-physical capacity was given a few months later, when her infant son, who had been pining himself ill for “papa,” was lying one night in her arms.  On the next morning she said to her sister:  “Alf is going to die.”  The child had no definite disease, but was wasting away, and it was argued to her that the returning spring would restore the health lost during the winter.  “No,” was her answer.  “He was lying asleep in my arms last night, and William” (her husband) “came to me and said that he wanted Alf with him, but that I might keep the other two.”  In vain she was assured that she had been dreaming, that it was quite natural that she should dream about her husband, and that her anxiety for the child had given the dream its shape.  Nothing would persuade her that she had not seen her husband, or that the information he had given her was not true.  So it was no matter of surprise to her when in the following March her arms were empty, and a waxen form lay lifeless in the baby’s cot.

My brother and I were allowed to see him just before he was placed in his coffin; I can see him still, so white and beautiful, with a black spot in the middle of the fair, waxen forehead, and I remember the deadly cold which startled me when I was told to kiss my little brother.  It was the first time that I had touched Death.  That black spot made a curious impression on me, and long afterwards, asking what had caused it, I was told that at the moment after his death my mother had passionately kissed the baby brow.  Pathetic thought, that the mother’s kiss of farewell should have been marked by the first sign of corruption on the child’s face!

I do not mention these stories because they are in any fashion remarkable or out of the way, but only to show that the sensitiveness to impressions other than physical ones, that was a marked feature in my own childhood, was present also in the family to which I belonged.  For the physical nature is inherited from parents, and sensitiveness to psychic impressions is a property of the physical body; in our family, as in so many Irish ones, belief in “ghosts” of all descriptions was general, and my mother has told me of the banshee that she had heard wailing when the death-hour of one of the family was near.  To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself a child.  Punch and Judy were living entities, and the tragedy in which they bore part cost me many an agony of tears; to this day I can remember running away when I heard the squawk of the coming Punch, and burying my head in the pillows