Once, I remember, they foretold an indefinite calamity to be brought upon me before sunset on the following Saturday.  Before sunset on that Saturday I lost a thousand dollars in mining stock which had stood in all Eastern eyes as solid as its own gold.  At another time I was warned by a medium in Philadelphia that my wife, then visiting in Boston, was taken suddenly ill.  I had left her in perfect health; but feeling nevertheless uneasy, I took the night train and went directly to her.  I found her in the agonies of a severe attack of pleurisy, just preparing to send a telegram to me.

“Their prophecies are unreliable, notwithstanding coincidences,” wrote George Garth.  “Let them alone, Fred, I beg of you.  You will regret it if you don’t.”

“Once let me be fairly taken in and cheated to my face,” I made reply, “and I may compress my views to your platform.  Until then I must gang my own gait.”

I now come to the remarkable portion of my story,—­at least it seems to me the remarkable portion under my present conditions of vision.

In August of the summer following Miss Fellows’s visit, and the manifestations in my house at Atkinsville, I was startled one pleasant morning, while sitting in the office of a medium in Washington Street in Boston, by a singularly unpleasant communication.

“The second day of next May,” wrote the medium,—­she wrote with the forefinger of one hand upon the palm of the other,—­“the second of May, at one o’clock in the afternoon, you will be summoned into a spiritual state of existence.”

“I suppose, in good English, that means I’m going to die,” I replied, carelessly.  “Would you be so good as to write it with a pen and ink, that there may be no mistake?”

She wrote it distinctly:  “The second of May, at one o’clock in the afternoon.”

I pocketed the slip of paper for further use, and sat reflecting.

“How do you know it?”

“I don’t know it.  I am told.”

“Who tells you?”

“Jerusha Babcock and George Washington.”

Jerusha Babcock was the name of my maternal grandmother.  What could the woman know of my maternal grandmother?  It did not occur to me, I believe, to wonder what occasion George Washington could find to concern himself about my dying or my living.  There stood the uncanny Jerusha as pledge that my informant knew what she was talking about.  I left the office with an uneasy sinking at the heart.  There was a coffin-store near by, and I remember the peculiar interest with which I studied the quilting of the satin lining, and the peculiar crawling sensation which crept to my fingers’ ends.

Determined not to be unnecessarily alarmed, I spent the next three weeks in testing the communication.  I visited one more medium in Boston, two in New York, one in New Haven, one in Philadelphia, and one in a little out-of-the-way Connecticut village, where I spent a night, and did not know a soul.  None of these people, I am confident, had ever seen my face or heard, my name before.