Chapter 21 Part 1.

Presentiments are strange things, and so are sympathies, and so are signs, and the three

combined make one mystery to which humanity has not yet found the key.

I never laughed at presentiments in my life, because I've had strange ones of my own.

Sympathies, I believe, exist, for instance, between far distant, long absent, wholly

estranged relatives, asserting non-mustanding their alienation, the unity of the source

to which each traces his origin, whose workings baffled mortal comprehension, and signs

for ought we know may be but the sympathies of nature with man.

When I was a little girl, only six years old, I one night heard Bessie Levin say to Martha

Abbott, the cheat-been dreaming about a little child, and that to dream of children was

a sure sign of trouble, either to oneself or one's kin.

The saying might have worn out of my memory, had not a circumstance immediately followed,

which served indelibly to fix it there.

The next day Bessie was sent for home to the deathbed of her little sister.

Of late, I had often recalled the saying and this incident.

For during the past week, scarcely a night had gone over my couch that had not brought

with it a dream of an infant, which I sometimes hushed in my arms, sometimes dandled on my

knee, sometimes watched, playing with daisies on a lawn, or again, dabbling its hands and

running water.

It was a wailing child this night, and a laughing one the next.

Now it nestled close to me, and now it ran from me.

But whatever mood the apparition advanced, whatever aspect it wore, it failed not for

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