Now, soon after, a train ran off the line and the engine and tender fell, breaking through the protecting wall and crashing down on the very stones where the child was accustomed to sit.
In the other case,[1] into which Professor W. F. Barrett made a special enquiry, Captain MacGowan was in Brooklyn with his two boys, then on their holidays. He promised the boys that he would take them to the theatre and booked seats on the previous day; but on the day of the proposed visit he heard a voice within him constantly saying:
"Do not go to the theatre; take the boys back to school."
[1] Ibid., vol. i., p. 283.
He hesitated, gave up his plan and resumed it again. But the words kept repeating themselves and impressing themselves upon him; and, in the end, he definitely decided not to go, much to the two boys' disgust. That night the theatre was destroyed by fire, with a loss of three hundred lives.
We may add to this the prevision of the Battle of Borodino, to which I have already alluded, I will give the story in fuller detail, as told in the journal of Stephen Grellet the Quaker.
About three months before the French army entered Russia, the wife of General Toutschkoff dreamt that she was at an inn in a town unknown to her and that her father came into her room, holding her only son by the hand, and said to her, in a pitiful tone:
"Your happiness is at an end. He"—meaning Countess Toutschkoff's husband—"has fallen. He has fallen at Borodino."
The dream was repeated a second and a third time. Her anguish of mind was such that she woke her husband and asked him:
"Where is Borodino?" They looked for the name on the map and did not find it.