"On January 17th of this year (1895) I was haunted all day with an indefinable dread, amounting to positive terror if I yielded in the least to its influence. A little before six o'clock I went to my maid's room and casually inquired of her whether she believed in presentiments. She answered: 'Don't let them get hold of you; it is a bad habit.' I replied: 'This is no ordinary presentiment. All day long I have felt that something terrible is impending; of what nature I do not know. I have fought against it, but to no purpose. It is a terror I am positively _possessed_ with.' I was proceeding to describe it in fuller detail, when my mother entered the room with a telegram in her hand. One glance at her face told me that my foreboding had not been a groundless depression. The telegram was to the effect that my brother had been taken very ill at Cambridge and needed my mother at once to nurse him. "I presume that the intensity of my foreboding was due to the very serious nature of his illness. "I experienced at different times what are in common parlance termed 'presentiments'; but only on one other occasion has the same peculiar _terror_ (a chilling conviction of impending trouble) beset me." This is corroborated both by the maid and Miss W.'s brother, an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge, who had met with a serious accident the same afternoon. The affection between brother and sister was, it is related, very close. Of a well-known type of case the following is a good example. The Hon. Mrs Fox Powys is the narrator:-- "July 1882. "I was expecting my husband home, and shortly after the time he ought to have arrived (about ten P.M.) I heard a cab drive up to the door, the bell ring, my husband's voice talking with the cabman, the front door open and his step come up the stairs. I went to the drawing-room, opened it, and to my astonishment saw no one. I could hardly believe he was not there, the whole thing was so vivid, and the street was particularly quiet at the time. About twenty minutes or so after this my husband _really_ arrived, though nothing sounded to me more real than it did the first time. The train was late, and he had been thinking I might be anxious." In response to further inquiries, Mrs Powys added: "To me the whole thing was very noisy and real, but no one else can have heard anything, for the bell I heard ring was not answered. It was a quiet street in town, and there was no vehicle of any kind passing at the time; and on finding no one on the landing as I expected, I went at once to the window, and there was nothing to be seen, and no sound to be heard, which would have been the case had the cab been driven off."