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 action is entirely independent of the physical body, and in support of this view I will cite yet another experience.

It was about the year 1875, when I was a young Assistant Commissioner in the Punjab, that I was ordered to the small up-country station of Akalpur,[1] and took possession of the Assistant Commissioner’s bungalow there.  On the night of our arrival in the bungalow, my wife and I had our charpoys—­light Indian bedsteads—­placed side by side in a certain room and went to bed.  The last thing I remembered before falling asleep, was seeing my wife sitting up in bed, reading with a lamp on a small table beside her.  Suddenly I was awakened by the sound of a shot, and starting up, found the room in darkness.  I immediately lit a candle which was on a chair by my bedside, and found my wife still sitting up with the book on her knee, but the lamp had gone out.

“Take me away, take me into another room,” she exclaimed.

“Why, what is the matter?” I said.

“Did you not see it?” she replied.

“See what?” I asked.

“Don’t stop to ask any questions,” she replied; “get me out of this room at once; I can’t stop here another minute.”