“On Friday morning I received a letter stating that Mrs. ——­ had died at about midnight on the previous Wednesday.  I hastened off to Adare and had an interview with my bereaved friend.  With one item of our conversation I will close.  He told me that his wife sank rapidly on Wednesday, until when night came on she became delirious.  She spoke incoherently, as if revisiting scenes and places once familiar.  ’She thought she was in your house,’ he said, ’and was apparently holding a conversation with you, as she used to keep silence at intervals as if listening to your replies.’  I asked him if he could possibly remember the hour at which the imaginary conversation took place.  He replied that, curiously enough, he could tell it accurately, as he had looked at his watch, and found the time between half-past ten and eleven o’clock—­the exact time of the mysterious manifestations heard by me.”

A lady sends the following personal experience:  “I had a cousin in the country who was not very strong, and on one occasion she desired me to go to her, and accompany her to K——.  I consented to do so, and arranged a day to go and meet her:  this was in the month of February.  The evening before I was to go, I was sitting by the fire in my small parlour about 5 P.M.  There was no light in the room except what proceeded from the fire.  Beside the fireplace was an armchair, where my cousin usually sat when she was with me.  Suddenly that chair was illuminated by a light so intensely bright that it actually seemed to heave under it, though the remainder of the room remained in semi-darkness.  I called out in amazement, ‘What has happened to the chair?’ In a moment the light vanished, and the chair was as before.  In the morning I heard that my cousin had died about the same time that I saw the light.”

We now come to the ordinary type, i.e. where a figure appears.  The following tale illustrates a point we have already alluded to, namely, that the apparition is sometimes seen by a disinterested person, and not by those whom one would naturally expect should see it.  A lady writes as follows:  “At Island Magee is the Knowehead Lonan, a long, hilly, narrow road, bordered on either side by high thorn-hedges and fields.  Twenty years ago, when I was a young girl, I used to go to the post-office at the Knowehead on Sunday mornings down the Lonan, taking the dogs for the run.  One Sunday as I had got to the top of the hill on my return journey, I looked back, and saw a man walking rapidly after me, but still a good way off.  I hastened my steps, for the day was muddy, and I did not want him to see me in a bedraggled state.  But he seemed to come on so fast as to be soon close behind me, and I wondered he did not pass me, so on we went, I never turning to look back.  About a quarter of a mile farther on I met A. B. on ‘Dick’s Brae,’ on her way to church or Sunday school, and stopped to speak to her.  I wanted to ask who the man was, but he seemed to be so close that I did not like to do so, and expected he had passed.  When I moved on, I was surprised to find he was still following me, while my dogs were lagging behind with downcast heads and drooping tails.