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Page 49
For a long time they never made a failure. Absolute strangers told me
facts about myself which not even my own wife knew: whether they spoke
with the tongues of devils, or whether, by some unknown laws of
magnetism, they simply _read my thoughts_, I am not even now prepared to
say. I think if they had made a miss I should have been spared some
suffering. Their communications had sometimes a ridiculous aimlessness,
and occasionally a subtle deviltry coated about with religion, like a
pill with sugar, but often a significant and fearful accuracy.
Once, I remember, they foretold an indefinite calamity to be brought
upon me before sunset on the following Saturday. Before sunset on that
Saturday I lost a thousand dollars in mining stock which had stood in
all Eastern eyes as solid as its own gold. At another time I was warned
by a medium in Philadelphia that my wife, then visiting in Boston, was
taken suddenly ill. I had left her in perfect health; but feeling
nevertheless uneasy, I took the night train and went directly to her. I
found her in the agonies of a severe attack of pleurisy, just preparing
to send a telegram to me.
"Their prophecies are unreliable, notwithstanding coincidences," wrote
George Garth. "Let them alone, Fred, I beg of you. You will regret it if
you don't."
"Once let me be fairly taken in and cheated to my face," I made reply,
"and I may compress my views to your platform. Until then I must gang my
own gait."
I now come to the remarkable portion of my story,--at least it seems
to me the remarkable portion under my present conditions of vision.
In August of the summer following Miss Fellows's visit, and the
manifestations in my house at Atkinsville, I was startled one pleasant
morning, while sitting in the office of a medium in Washington Street in
Boston, by a singularly unpleasant communication.
"The second day of next May," wrote the medium,--she wrote with the
forefinger of one hand upon the palm of the other,--"the second of May,
at one o'clock in the afternoon, you will be summoned into a spiritual
state of existence."
"I suppose, in good English, that means I'm going to die," I replied,
carelessly. "Would you be so good as to write it with a pen and ink,
that there may be no mistake?"
She wrote it distinctly: "The second of May, at one o'clock in the
afternoon."
I pocketed the slip of paper for further use, and sat reflecting.
"How do you know it?"
"_I_ don't know it. I am told."
"Who tells you?"
"Jerusha Babcock and George Washington."
Jerusha Babcock was the name of my maternal grandmother. What could the
woman know of my maternal grandmother? It did not occur to me, I
believe, to wonder what occasion George Washington could find to concern
himself about my dying or my living. There stood the uncanny Jerusha as
pledge that my informant knew what she was talking about. I left the
office with an uneasy sinking at the heart. There was a coffin-store
near by, and I remember the peculiar interest with which I studied the
quilting of the satin lining, and the peculiar crawling sensation which
crept to my fingers' ends.
Determined not to be unnecessarily alarmed, I spent the next three weeks
in testing the communication. I visited one more medium in Boston, two
in New York, one in New Haven, one in Philadelphia, and one in a little
out-of-the-way Connecticut village, where I spent a night, and did not
know a soul. None of these people, I am confident, had ever seen my face
or heard, my name before.
It was a circumstance calculated at least to arrest attention, that
these seven people, each unknown to the others, and without concert with
the others, repeated the ugly message which had sought me out through
the happy summer morning in Washington Street. There was no hesitation,
no doubt, no contradiction. I could not trip them or cross-question them
out of it. Unerring, assured, and consistent, the fiat went forth:--
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