I wrote to my father.

I wished to know whether there were any hope for me.

He wrote back to me these words: 'Too late, my dear son--on the very day of the vision you describe to me, A.was married'." The colonel did not keep his determination not to marry, for his Life is edited by his daughter, who often heard her father mention the incident, "precisely in the same manner, and exactly as it is in the book".

{103} If thinking of friends and lovers, lost or dead, could bring their forms and voices before the eye and ear of flesh, there would be a world of hallucinations around us.

"But it wants heaven-sent moments for this skill," and few bridal nights send a vision and a voice to the bed of a wakeful lover far away.
Stories of this kind, appearances of the living or dying really at a distance, might be multiplied to any extent.