“He sealed up the paper and asked his eldest sister to certify in writing, that he had delivered that sealed paper to her that day. “Both of them had almost forgotten the circumstance, when, about two months afterward, a letter arrived from Jamaica, conveying the sad intelligence that their brother had died there, at the very moment—allowing for the difference of time—of his death-like appearance to his mother and brother! “Mr. James G**** was a student of medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and resided in the same house in which I lived, at the time he related to us the circumstances. I regret that although only a few years have elapsed since I heard him relate it, the exact dates which he then communicated have escaped my memory, and I will not attempt to supply them. He was a young gentleman of undoubted veracity, and I believe the circumstances to be true as stated. “_New York, 22d December, 1840._” In remarking on this communication, I will not say it is impossible that the extraordinary circumstance of two persons having each the same _dream_—I will call it—at the same hour, and that both believed they were awakened by the phantom of a distant relative, may not be explained by natural causes, as some things of a similar character were attempted to be explained, under the word “spirit,” in an early edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, but in the absence of _facts_, what do such attempts amount to? Probabilities and possibilities! But in this instance, although the young man’s death may have been imprinted on his mother’s and brother’s imagination—from apprehension of his fate, we will say, by reading or hearing of the ravages of yellow fever—which, however, is not alluded to in the lady’s interesting letter, the singularity is, how the dream, or phantom, should come to visit _both_—at precisely the _same hour_—and dressed exactly _alike_, and that so vividly, as to awake them in fear and terror! It would be folly to attempt a rational explanation—such things are beyond human comprehension. We may speculate, but we can never penetrate the veil under which the Divine Will has shrouded such mysteries; yet I have not the shadow of a doubt that in some future state of existence, they will, to those who walk aright in this, be made clear and manifest, and we will then, possibly, wonder how near, how very close we have been allowed to approach the threshold, without being able to cross it! “_Thus_ far shalt thou go, and _no_ farther!”