How does he do it?

In December Old Moore again foresees trouble, just when I was hoping it was all over.  “Frauds will come to light, and death will find its victims.”

And all this information is given to us for a penny.

The palmist examines our hand.  “You will go a journey,” he tells us.  It is marvellous!  How could he have known that only the night before we had been discussing the advisability of taking the children to Margate for the holidays?

“There is trouble in store for you,” he tells us, regretfully, “but you will get over it.”  We feel that the future has no secret hidden from him.

We have “presentiments” that people we love, who are climbing mountains, who are fond of ballooning, are in danger.

The sister of a friend of mine who went out to the South African War as a volunteer had three presentiments of his death.  He came home safe and sound, but admitted that on three distinct occasions he had been in imminent danger.  It seemed to the dear lady a proof of everything she had ever read.

Another friend of mine was waked in the middle of the night by his wife, who insisted that he should dress himself and walk three miles across a moor because she had had a dream that something terrible was happening to a bosom friend of hers.  The bosom friend and her husband were rather indignant at being waked at two o’clock in the morning, but their indignation was mild compared with that of the dreamer on learning that nothing was the matter.  From that day forward a coldness sprang up between the two families.

I would give much to believe in ghosts.  The interest of life would be multiplied by its own square power could we communicate with the myriad dead watching us from their mountain summits.  Mr. Zangwill, in a poem that should live, draws for us a pathetic picture of blind children playing in a garden, laughing, romping.  All their lives they have lived in darkness; they are content.  But, the wonder of it, could their eyes by some miracle be opened!