Fig. 13a

I present here the basket of “pink roses and violets” which my wife drew, and then the spray of pink double cosmos and violets which met her eyes when she opened the young “psychic’s” letter a day or two later. I explain that my wife’s drawing (Fig. [13]) is partly written over by the words of her notes; while in Jan’s letter the violets had to be at once traced in pencil, as they would not last. My wife drew pencil marks around them and wrote the word “violet” in three places, to indicate what the marks meant. The cosmos flowers, pressed and dried, are still exactly as Jan stuck them into position and as they remained until I took them to be photographed (Fig. [13a]).

6

As I have said, I hesitate to tell about incidents such as these. They are hard to believe, and the skeptic may say that my wife was hypnotized by Jan, and made to believe them. But it happens that Craig has been able to establish exactly the same rapport with her husband, who has never had anything to do with hypnosis, except to watch it a few times. A Socialist “muck-raker,” much wrapped up in his job, the husband sits and reads, or revises manuscript, while the wife works her white magic upon his mind. Suddenly his train of thought is broken by an exclamation; the wife has “willed” him to do such and so—and he has done it! Or maybe she has been asleep, and come out with the tail end of a dream, and has written down what appears to be a lot of rubbish—but turns out to be a reproduction of something the husband has been reading or writing at that very moment! Hear one or two instances of such events, all written down at the time.

Colonel Lindbergh has flown to France, but Craig does not know much about it, because she is not reading the papers, she is asking, “What is life?” A year passes, and in the mail I receive a monthly magazine, the Lantern, published by Sacco-Vanzetti sympathizers in Boston. I open it, and find an article by a young radical, assailing Lindbergh because he does not follow in his father’s footsteps; his father was a radical congressman, but now the son allows himself to be used by the army and navy people, and by the capitalist press, to distract the minds of the masses from social justice. So runs the charge; and before I am through reading it, my wife comes downstairs from a nap. “What are you reading?” she asks, and I answer: “Something about Lindbergh.” Says my wife: “Here are my notes about a dream I just had.” She hands me a sheet of paper, I have it before me now as I write, and I give it with misspelling and abbreviations exactly as she wrote it in a hurry, not anticipating that it would ever become public:

“‘I do not believe that Lindberg flew across the ocean in order to take a ransome from a foreign gov as well as from his own. Nor in order to induce the nations of the earth to a war in the air.’ Words which were in my mind as I awoke from nap on aft May 25.”

I should add that my wife had had no opportunity to look at the Boston magazine, whether consciously or unconsciously. She tells me that Lindbergh had not been in her conscious mind for a long time, and she had no remotest idea that the radicals were attacking him.

Another instance: I am reading the latest “book of the month,” which has just come in the mail, and to which my wife has paid no attention. She interrupts me with a question: “Are there any flowers in what you are reading?” I answer, “Yes,” and she says: “I have been trying to concentrate, and I keep seeing flowers. I have drawn them.” She hands me two drawings (Figs. [14a], [14b]):

The book was Mumford’s Herman Melville, and I was at page 346, a chapter entitled, “The Flowering Aloe.” On this page are six lines from a poem called “The American Aloe on Exhibition.” On the preceding page is a discussion of the habits of this plant. While my wife was making the left-hand drawing (Fig. [14a]), I had been reading page 344: “the red clover had blushed through the fields about their house”; and “he would return home with a handful of clover blossoms.”