[Footnote 73: See the case recorded by Miss X. (_Proc. S.P.R._, vol. v. pp. 507, 508). In this instance Miss X. saw in the crystal a notice of a friend's death in the form of an extract from the obituary column of the _Times_, in which journal she had almost certainly seen the news, without perceiving it, the day before. There is a dream recorded in _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. pp. 687, 688, which may probably be explained as the emergence in dream of intelligence unconsciously received a few hours before.] [Footnote 74: I have before me as I write one case of the kind which will serve as a sample. A told us the story, and induced B to write to us about it. B informed us that he heard it from his brother C, a F.R.S., who had received it from D, to whom it was told by E; who had it from the lips of F, "who was a visitor at the house where the occurrence took place." We wrote to D, who referred us to two sources of information, G and H. G wrote in reply to our letter that he heard the story from a stranger at a dinner-party "about three years ago," and promised further inquiries. H referred us to J and K. Our letter to K was answered by his cousin L, who wrote that she had heard it from M, "who got it from some one who was present," and further inquiries were again promised. It is needless to add that in cases of this kind the story, like a will-o'-the-wisp, ever recedes as we advance, until it ends with the nameless stranger at some dinner long since gone "away in the Ewigkeit."] [Footnote 75: There is, as Mr. Gurney has pointed out, a converse error to be guarded against--viz., the gradual effacement of the lines of an impression, so that an actual waking hallucination has in some instances come to be regarded, after a long interval, as only a dream.] [Footnote 76: A good illustration of this kind of embellishment, in a case recorded at second-hand, will be found in the footnote on a case in Chapter XII.] [Footnote 77: So in a case given in the _Annales des Sciences Psychiques_, vol. ii. pp. 5-10, we have an extract from the log-book of the _Jacques-Gabriel_, which records that the captain, mate, and another man when at sea heard, on the 17th July 1852, the sound of a woman's voice crying. In a marginal note on the log-book the captain adds that on reaching port they learnt of the death of the mate's wife, "_on the same day and at the same hour_." But the official register shows that the death took place on the 16_th June_ 1852.] [Footnote 78: That such a pseudo-memory on the part of a person not professing to be the actual percipient is possible after a long interval appears to be shown by the account just cited of the "ghost" seen by the nurse in a foreign hotel. But we have no evidence that a memory hallucination of this kind could be, as demanded by the theory, of instantaneous or very rapid growth; or that any verbal suggestion could intercalate a false picture into a series of still recent and unimpaired memories.]