The following story has been currently related in Rome, and is already in print. I take it from a German work, and I do not know how far its authenticity can be established. It is to the effect that two friends having agreed to attend confession together, one of them went at the appointed time to the Abbate B——, and made his confession; after which the priest commenced the usual admonition, in the midst of which he suddenly ceased speaking. After waiting a short time, the penitent stepped forward and perceived him lying in the confessional in a state of insensibility. Aid was summoned and means used to restore him, which were for some time ineffectual; at length, when he opened his eyes, he bade the penitent recite a prayer for his friend, who had just expired. This proved to be the case, on inquiry; and when the young man, who had naturally hastened to his friend’s house, expressed a hope that he had not died without the last offices of the church, he was told in amazement, that the Abbate B—— had arrived just as he was in _extremis_, and had remained with him till he died. These appearances seem to have taken place when the corporeal condition of the person seen elsewhere, permits us to conceive the possibility of the spirit’s having withdrawn from the body; but the question then naturally arises, what is it that was seen; and I confess, that of all the difficulties that surround the subject, I have undertaken to treat of, this seems to me the greatest; for we can not suppose that a spirit can be visible to the human eye, and both in the above instances and several others I have to narrate, there is nothing that can lead us to the conclusion, that the persons who saw the wraith or double, were in any other than a normal state; the figure, in short, seems to have been perceived through their external organs of sense. Before I discuss this question, however, any further, I will relate some instances of a similar kind, only with this difference, that the wraith appearing as nearly as could be ascertained at the moment of death, it remains uncertain whether it was seen before or after the dissolution had taken place. As in both these cases above related and those that follow, the material body was visible in one place, while the wraith was visible in another, they appear to be strictly analogous; especially, as in both class of examples, the body itself was either dead or in a state that closely resembled death.