Next day, Sunday, February 6, Mrs. Bissett received, what was not usual—­a letter from her sister in India, Mrs. Clifton, dated January 20.  Mrs. Clifton described a place in a native State, where she had been at a great ‘function,’ in certain gardens beside a river.  She added that they were going to another place for a certain purpose, ’and then we go into camp till the end of February.’  One of Mr. Clifton’s duties is to direct the clearing of wood preparatory to the formation of the camp, as in Miss Angus’s crystal picture.[15] The sceptical Mrs. Cockburn heard of these coincidences, and an idea occurred to her.  She wrote to her daughter, who has been mentioned, and asked whether, on Wednesday, February 2, she had been lying on a sofa in her bed-room, with bare feet.  The young lady confessed that it was indeed so;[16] and, when she heard how the fact came to be known, expressed herself with some warmth on the abuse of glass balls, which tend to rob life of its privacy.

In this case the prima facie aspect of things is that a thought of Mr. Bissett’s about his stockbroker, dulce ridentem, somehow reflected itself into Miss Angus’s mind by way of the glass ball, and was interrupted by a thought of Mrs. Cockburn’s, as to her daughter.  But how these thoughts came to display the unknown facts concerning the garden by the river, the felling of trees for a camp, and the bare feet, is a question about which it is vain to theorise.[17]

On the vanishing of the jungle scene there appeared a picture of a man in a dark undress uniform, beside a great bay, in which were ships of war.  Wooden huts, as in a plague district, were on shore.  Mr. Bissett asked, ‘What is the man’s expression?’ ’He looks as if he had been giving a lot of last orders.’  Then appeared ’a place like a hospital, with five or six beds—­no, berths:  it is a ship.  Here is the man again.’  He was minutely described, one peculiarity being the way in which his hair grew—­or, rather, did not grow—­on his temples.

Miss Angus now asked, ’Where is my little lady?’—­meaning the lady of the twirling parasol and staccato walk.  ‘Oh, I’ve left off thinking of her,’ said Mrs. Bissett, who had been thinking of, and recognised in the officer in undress uniform, her brother, the man with the singular hair, whose face, in fact, had been scarred in that way by an encounter with a tiger.  He was expected to sail from Bombay, but news of his setting forth has not been received (February 10) at the moment when this is written.[18]

In these Indian cases, ‘thought transference’ may account for the correspondence between the figures seen by Miss Angus and the ideas in the mind of Mr. and Mrs. Bissett.  But the hypothesis of thought transference, while it would cover the wooden huts at Bombay (Mrs. Bissett knowing that her brother was about to leave that place), can scarcely explain the scene in the garden by the river and the scene with the trees.  The incident of the bare feet may be regarded as a fortuitous coincidence, since Miss Angus saw the young lady foreshortened, and could not describe her face.