This feeling about my family made me a sensitive receiving plate and accounts, I suppose, for the only proof I personally have ever had of the possibilities in telepathy. This came the first Sunday of June, 1892. I had hardly taken my coffee when I fell prey to a most unaccountable alarm. What it was about, I did not know. I could not work and finally went to the street. For hours I walked, not able to throw off the black thing that enveloped me. It was late in the afternoon when I returned to find a compatriot with a letter of introduction waiting. As he was leaving the apartment after his call I picked up my daily copy of _Le Temps_ and as I always did turned first to the news from _les Etats Unis_. It was to read that the city of Titusville and its neighbor Oil City had been utterly destroyed by flood and fire. The only buildings left in my home town were said to be the railroad station and a foundry. A hundred and fifty persons had been drowned or burned to death—the inhabitants had taken to the hills. At that moment my caller came back for his umbrella. I seized him roughly: “Read, read. What shall I do?” He was a sensible man. “Steady, steady,” he said. “Put on your hat, and we’ll go out and get other papers.” We were soon back with the last editions of all the English and French journals. They all gave space to the disaster, each more distressing and unsatisfactory than the one before. This explains my black day, I told myself. The family is dead—our home gone. It was useless to cable, for the newspapers all spoke of broken communications. But the next morning as I was dressing, Madame Bonnet came in with a cablegram. Hardly daring to open it I backed into the corner of the room to feel the support behind me of the walls while my friend Mrs. Vincent, still with me, watched with white face. The telegram was from my brother, and it had just one word. “Safe.” When finally a letter came, I found I had justification for my day of horror. For many hours there had been but little doubt in the minds of my father and brother that the family would have to take to the hills. But they were safe, our home was standing. The experience left me more nervous than ever about them, and now that my friends were gone it took all the resolution I could summon to keep my foolish alarms under control.