COMING EVENTS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 224, 22 September 1938, Page 30

COMING EVENTS.

GRUESOME SHADOWS. SOME REMARKABLE INSTANCES. An American boy was taken by hla parents to visit a prison. Passing one of the cells in which a notorious criminal had been incarcerated, the boy's father playfully pushed him in and closed the door upon him. The child, overcome by terror, screamed aloud, and could scarcely be comforted ■by his mother's caress. Yean passed. The lad half-thoughtleeely fell into crime, and he was recalled to his better nature only on finding himself, having been sentenced to a term of imprisonment, in the identical cell into which he bad been momentarily thrust aa a child. The fate of Franklin, the explorer, wse unwittingly prefigured, on the eve of his departure c. hie last voyage, at the hands of hie devoted wife. As he • lay dosing on a sofa, Lady Franklin i threw something over his feet. Franklin woke in consternation, saying: "Why, there's a flag thrown over me! j Don't you know that they lay the. Union ■ Jack over a corpse I" , i A more gruenome foreshadowing of which the subject was the projector, was ' that mentioned by Dioken* in a letter from Boston to Lord Lytton. At a dinner party given by Dr. Welmtor, professor of chemistry at Harvard, while the wine was going its rounds, the host, in whiinwii-al humour, ordered the lights to he extinguished ami a bowl of burning minerals to be brought in, to afford the company the .novel entertainment of seeing how ghn«tly they looked by its light. Each guest wim looking horroretricken at hi* neighbour, when Webster wiim seen liemliiift over the phosphore* rent bowl with a rope round his neck, cirniilnting with gha»tly realism the aspect of a hanged man! Within a year of this weird fooling Webster ha,l the hangman's noose in deadly earnest round hi. neck, for murder. In one of Hawthorne's eerie tales, sujrjrestcd, hh he tells us, by fact, the slmilow of a terrible event is cast through the medium of a picture. While tuking the portraits of a bridal pair, a painter was moved, by some mysterious impulse, to make for himself a sketch representing t'.- bridegroom, with u look of frenzy ill hi* face, in the act of plunghig a.knife into the bosom of his terrified bride. Time parsed. The painter, revisitiiifi their home, beheld the ill-fated young man. with th-; look and attitude he had portrayed, ahmt to fulfil the pictured crime, and he was only just in, tiiue. t«l'»t»^ h *»%hand.