8
We will abridge our subject still further, referring readers who
wish to know the details to the originals, lest we should never
have done; or rather, instead of attempting an abridgment, which
would still be too long, so plentiful are the materials, we will
content ourselves with enumerating a few instances, all taken
from Bozzano's Des Phenomenes premonitoires. We read there of a
funeral procession seen on a high-road several days before it
actually passed that way; or, again, of a young mechanic who, in
the beginning of November, dreamt that he came home at half-past
five in the afternoon and saw his sister's little girl run over
by a tram-car while crossing the street in front of the house. He
told his dream, in great distress; and, on the 13th of the same
month, in spite of all the precautions that had been taken, the
child was run over by the tram-car and killed at the hour named.
We find the ghost, the phantom animal or the mysterious noise
which, in certain families, is the traditional herald of a death
or of an imminent catastrophe. We find the celebrated vision
which the painter Segantini had thirteen days before his decease,
every detail of which remained in his mind and was represented in
his last picture, Death. We find the Messina disaster dearly
foreseen, twice over, by a little girl who perished under the
ruins of the ill-fated city; and we read of a dream which, three
months before the French invasion of Russia, foretold to Countess
Toutschkoff that her husband would fall at Borodino, a village so
little known at the time that those interested in the dream
looked in vain for its name on the maps.
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