"I don't know whether I do or not; I have never had one." "But you have known of others having them, haven't you?" "Of one other: but in that instance it was foreknowledge rather than a foreboding. The presentiment should have been mine; and I had none." "Would you mind telling me about it?" "No. It was while I was making the survey for a logging railway in Quebec. I expected to be out all summer, but in the middle of it the company called a halt and I went home. I hadn't wired or written, but when I reached Hinsdale my father was at the station to meet me. For three days my mother had been insisting that I would come, and to quiet her they had been meeting the trains. She died the next evening." "And you had no premonition?" "None whatever. For a month or more I had been beyond the reach of the mails; and I had left her in her usual health. It was a bolt out of a clear sky." Again the brawling stream and the whispering leaves fill the gap of silence; and as before, Lansdale is the first to speak. "I have always scouted such things, as sanity seems to demand. Stories with any element of the supernatural in them have never appealed to me because, however well authenticated, they were always stories, and never actual happenings in which I had any part. But for the last day or two I've had a growing sense of impending calamity, and I can't shake it off." There is the brusquerie of heartening in Jeffard's rejoinder. "Nonsense! It's only the imaginative part of you kicking against the pricks of a longish holiday." "That is ingenious, but I can't quite accept it. I've eaten and slept with the imaginative fiend long enough to be pretty well acquainted with his vagaries. This is altogether different. It is precisely the feeling you have had just before a storm; a sense of depression as intangible as darkness, but quite as real. It was with me a few minutes ago when I fell asleep, and the dream seemed to be a part of it." "Oh, dreams," says the scoffer; "I thought they had been accounted for by the dietists. I told you that last batch of panbread held possibilities. But go on and unload your dream. I'm shudder-proof." Lansdale tells it circumstantially, keeping his pipe alight in the periods.