PREMONITIONS OP DISASTER

Evening Star, Issue 12674, 30 November 1905, Page 7

PREMONITIONS OP DISASTER

A correspondent writes to the j Stan dard' as follows :—l spent the spring of l&d9 in Rome, and one afternoon, having occasion to call at the British Embassy, 1 went up the Via Venii bettembre on foot. Presently I came to a large house which was being rebuilt, all the scaffolding being inside, as is the fashion in Italy. 1 glanced up at the walls, and instantly felt that they were g'Jing to fall. There was no feeling of presentiment in my mind, but merely absolute conviction. I hurried across to the other side of the road and stood still for n >'ew seconds, suddenly oppressed by a momentary and yet intensely vivid realisation of the vanity and pathos of human i~.e. 'there was 1, able to take good care of my own skin, but what of the poor fellows who were on the walls at work ? Could I do anything to save them': Tho answer to this question was to the best of my judgment *" No," so I passed by, like the Levite, "on the other side." .Next day, or a few days afterwards, a lad whom 1 was coaching arrived for his less n long after the appointed time, ajid began to excuse himself for being so late, " the street was blocked," " there had been a terrible accident," then 1 .interrupted him. "I know," I said, " that house in the Via V'cnti Settembre has collansed." It had, and to this day 1 sometimes wonder if I was much to blame in making no attempt to save these workmen from the fate that I so clearly foresaw. Tho other case which I should like to place en record is in some ways still more remarkable. \\ hile on another Visit to Italy I spent part of an afternoon in the groat Campo Santo at Milan, and amongst all the hundreds of

monuments which 1 casually surveyed one only riveted my attention and impressed itself upon my memory. It was an ordinary tombstone, of quite commonplace character, erected to the memory of one Gertrude Fischer, who had died, according to the inscription en the stone, a few years previously whilst a student at the Milan Conservatoire. For some •Grange reason, which 1 cannot even imagine, this partuclar monument produced in roe a state oi feeling akin to that which I had once before experienced, as narrated above, in R me. The hopes ar.d ambitious of the young singer, ..er recognition of the approaching end, her death amongst strangers speaking a foreign tongue, were all pictured in my mind in a marvellously vivid style, and I said sadly to myself : " Valutas vanitatum ! Poor Gertrude Fischer is by this time clean f*,rgvtten, like a dead man, out of mind, even by those who loved her best." But thi» time I was wrong. From Milan I went on to Venice, I believe the very next day, or possibly the next but one, and on the platform I bought an Italian newspaper. There, to my amazement, was a paragraph detailing a' sad occurrence which had taken place at the cemetery the previous night. A lady, escaping the notice of tho cutitcde, had stayed in the burial ground after the gates were clow-d. and attempted suicide upon her daughter's grave. That daughter was Gertrude Fischer. I draw no inference. What 1 have stated is, t» the best of my belief, the truth ; and for the rest, I am a matter-of-fact person, with no sympathy with spiritualism or "isms" of "any kind. Yet it seems to me not improbable that the mind, of whose nature, as apart from the brain, its instrument, we jJniclically kr' v nothing, may be affected by causes' of which we have no perception, and in a manner which we cannot at present conceive. The lomg arm of coincid-onre stretches very conveniently across what mav be possibly mere gaps in our knowledge of causes and effects.