The boatman, who saw the accident, sprang forward to try to save them, and he noticed that they were floating high in the water “in quite an unnatural way, like,” as he said, and moving quietly towards the bank. This was all that he and the nurse saw, but the children each declared that “a beautiful person, all white and shining,” stood beside them in the water, held them up and guided them to the shore. Nor was their story without corroboration, for the bargeman’s little daughter, who ran up from the cabin when she heard the screams of the nurse, also affirmed that she saw a lovely lady in the water dragging the two children to the bank. Without fuller particulars than the story gives us, it is impossible to say with certainty from what class of helpers this “angel” was drawn; but the probabilities are in favour of its having been a developed human being functioning in the astral body, as will be seen when later on we deal with this subject from the other side, as it were--from the point of view of the helpers rather than the helped. A case in which the agency is somewhat more definitely distinguishable is related by the well-known clergyman, Dr. John Mason Neale. He states that a man who had recently lost his wife was on a visit with his little children at the country house of a friend. It was an old, rambling mansion, and in the lower part of it there were long, dark passages, in which the children played about with great delight. But presently they came upstairs very gravely, and two of them related that as they were running down one of these passages they were met by their mother, who told them to go back again, and then disappeared. Investigation revealed the fact that if the children had run but a few steps farther they would have fallen down a deep uncovered well which yawned full in their path, so that the apparition of their mother had saved them from almost certain death. In this instance there seems no reason to doubt that the mother herself was still keeping a loving watch over her children from the astral plane, and that (as has happened in some other cases) her intense desire to warn them of the danger into which they were so heedlessly rushing gave her the power to make herself visible and audible to them for the moment--or perhaps merely to impress their minds with the idea that they saw and heard her. It is possible, of course, that the helper may have been some one else, who took the familiar form of the mother in order not to alarm the children; but the simplest hypothesis is to attribute the intervention to the action of the ever-wakeful mother-love itself, undimmed by the passage through the gates of death.