Both President and Mrs. Lincoln were superstitious. They believed in dreams and signs, he more in dreams and she more in signs. When Mrs. Lincoln was away from him for a little time, visiting in Philadelphia in 1863, and Tad with her, Lincoln thought it sufficiently important to telegraph, lest the mail should be too slow, and sent her this message: "Executive Mansion, "Washington, June 9, 1863. "MRS. LINCOLN, "Philadelphia, Pa. "Think you better put Tad's pistol away. I had an ugly dream about him. "A. Lincoln." --Quoted in facsimile in _Harper's Magazine_ for February, 1897; _Lincoln's Home Life in the White House_, by Leslie J. Perry. In Lamon's book of _Recollections_, published in 1895, a very different book from his Life of Lincoln, he devotes an entire chapter to Lincoln's dreams and presentiments. He relates the story of the dream which Lincoln had not long before his assassination wherein he saw the East Room of the White House containing a catafalque with the body of an assassinated man lying upon it. Lincoln tried to remove himself from the shadow of this dream by recalling a story of life in Indiana, but could not shake off the gloom of it. Lamon says: "He was no dabbler in divination, astrology, horoscopy, prophecy, ghostly lore, or witcheries of any sort.... The moving power of dreams and visions of an extraordinary character he ascribed, as did the Patriarchs of old, to the Almighty Intelligence that governs the universe, their processes conforming strictly to natural laws."--_Recollections_, p. 120. In his Life of Lincoln, Lamon tells the story of the dream which Lincoln had late in the year 1860, when resting upon a lounge in his chamber he saw his figure reflected in a mirror opposite with two images, one of them a little paler than the other. It worried Lincoln, and he told his wife about it. She thought it was "a sign that Lincoln was to be elected for a second term and that the paleness of one of the faces indicated that he would not see life through the last term" (p. 477). As this optical illusion has been so often printed, and has seemed so weirdly prophetic of the event which followed, it may be well to quote an explanation of the incident from an address by Dr. Erastus Eugene Holt, of Portland, Maine: