6
We will now take another premonitory dream, strictly controlled by the committee of the S. P. R.[12] Early in September 1893, Annette, wife of Walter Jones, tobacconist, of Old Gravel Lane, East London, had her little boy ill. One night she dreamt that she saw a cart drive up and stop near where she was. It contained three coffins, “two white and one blue. One white coffin was bigger than the other; and the blue was the biggest of the three.” The driver took out the bigger white coffin and left it at the mother’s feet, driving off with the others. Mrs. Jones told her dream to her husband and to a neighbour, laying particular stress on the curious circumstance that one of the coffins was blue.
On the 10th of September, a friend of Mr. and Mrs. Jones was confined of a boy, who died on the 29th of the same month. Their own little boy died on the following Monday, the 2nd of October, being then sixteen months old. It was decided to bury the two children on the same day. On the morning of the day chosen, the parish priest informed Mr. and Mrs. Jones that another child had died in the neighbourhood and that its body would be brought into church along with the two others. Mrs. Jones remarked to her husband:
“If the coffin is blue, then my dream will come true. For the two other coffins were white.”
The third coffin was brought; it was blue. It remains to be observed that the dimensions of the coffins corresponded exactly with the dream premonitions, the smallest being that of the child who died first, the next that of the little Jones boy, who was sixteen months old, and the largest, the blue one, that of a boy six years of age.
Let us take, more or less at random, another case from the inexhaustible Proceedings.[13] The report is written by Mr. Alfred Cooper and attested by the Duchess of Hamilton, the Duke of Manchester and another gentleman to whom the duchess related the incident before the fulfilment of the prophetic vision:
“A fortnight before the death of the late Earl of L⸺,” says Mr. Cooper, “in 1882, I called upon the Duke of Hamilton, in Hill Street, to see him professionally. After I had finished seeing him, we went into the drawing-room, where the duchess was, and the duke said to me:
“‘Oh, Cooper, how is the earl?’
“The duchess said, ‘What earl?’ and, on my answering, ‘Lord L⸺,’ she replied:
“‘That is very odd. I have had a most extraordinary vision. I went to bed, but, after being in bed a short time, I was not exactly asleep, but thought I saw a scene as if from a play before me. The actors in it were Lord L⸺, in a chair, as if in a fit, with a man standing over him with a red beard. He was by the side of a bath, over which bath a red lamp was distinctly shown.’
“I then said:
“‘I am attending Lord L⸺ at present; there is very little the matter with him; he is not going to die; he will be all right very soon.’
“Well, he got better for a week and was nearly well, but, at the end of six or seven days after this, I was called to see him suddenly. He had inflammation of both lungs.
“I called in Sir William Jenner, but in six days he was a dead man. There were two male nurses attending on him; one had been taken ill. But, when I saw the other, the dream of the duchess was exactly represented. He was standing near a bath over the earl and, strange to say, his beard was red. There was the bath with the red lamp over it; and this brought the story to my mind.
“The vision seen by the duchess was told two weeks before the death of Lord L⸺. It is a most remarkable thing.”