He was visiting San Francisco for his health,
deluded man, and brought me a note of introduction from Mr. Lawrence
Barting. I had known Barting as a captain in the Federal army during the
civil war. At its close he had settled in Franklin, and in time became,
I had reason to think, somewhat prominent as a lawyer. Barting had
always seemed to me an honorable and truthful man, and the warm
friendship which he expressed in his note for Mr. Conway was to me
sufficient evidence that the latter was in every way worthy of my
confidence and esteem. At dinner one day Conway told me that it had been
solemnly agreed between him and Barting that the one who died first
should, if possible, communicate with the other from beyond the grave, in
some unmistakable way—just how, they had left (wisely, it seemed to me)
to be decided by the deceased, according to the opportunities that his
altered circumstances might present. “A few weeks after the conversation in which Mr. Conway spoke of this
agreement, I met him one day, walking slowly down Montgomery street,
apparently, from his abstracted air, in deep thought. He greeted me
coldly with merely a movement of the head and passed on, leaving me
standing on the walk, with half-proffered hand, surprised and naturally
somewhat piqued. The next day I met him again in the office of the
Palace Hotel, and seeing him about to repeat the disagreeable performance
of the day before, intercepted him in a doorway, with a friendly
salutation, and bluntly requested an explanation of his altered manner. He hesitated a moment; then, looking me frankly in the eyes, said:

“‘I do not think, Mr. Foley, that I have any longer a claim to your
friendship, since Mr. Barting appears to have withdrawn his own from
me—for what reason, I protest I do not know. If he has not already
informed you he probably will do so.’

“‘But,’ I replied, ‘I have not heard from Mr. Barting.’

“‘Heard from him!’ he repeated, with apparent surprise. ‘Why, he is
here. I met him yesterday ten minutes before meeting you. I gave you
exactly the same greeting that he gave me. I met him again not a quarter
of an hour ago, and his manner was precisely the same: he merely bowed
and passed on. I shall not soon forget your civility to me. Good
morning, or—as it may please you—farewell.’

“All this seemed to me singularly considerate and delicate behavior on
the part of Mr. Conway. “As dramatic situations and literary effects are foreign to my purpose I
will explain at once that Mr. Barting was dead. He had died in Nashville
four days before this conversation. Calling on Mr. Conway, I apprised
him of our friend’s death, showing him the letters announcing it. He was
visibly affected in a way that forbade me to entertain a doubt of his
sincerity. “‘It seems incredible,’ he said, after a period of reflection. ‘I
suppose I must have mistaken another man for Barting, and that man’s cold
greeting was merely a stranger’s civil acknowledgment of my own. I
remember, indeed, that he lacked Barting’s mustache.’

“‘Doubtless it was another man,’ I assented; and the subject was never
afterward mentioned between us. But I had in my pocket a photograph of
Barting, which had been inclosed in the letter from his widow. It had
been taken a week before his death, and was without a mustache.”



A WIRELESS MESSAGE


IN the summer of 1896 Mr. William Holt, a wealthy manufacturer of
Chicago, was living temporarily in a little town of central New York, the
name of which the writer’s memory has not retained. Mr. Holt had had
“trouble with his wife,” from whom he had parted a year before. Whether
the trouble was anything more serious than “incompatibility of temper,”
he is probably the only living person that knows: he is not addicted to
the vice of confidences. Yet he has related the incident herein set down
to at least one person without exacting a pledge of secrecy. He is now
living in Europe. One evening he had left the house of a brother whom he was visiting, for
a stroll in the country. It may be assumed—whatever the value of the
assumption in connection with what is said to have occurred—that his mind
was occupied with reflections on his domestic infelicities and the
distressing changes that they had wrought in his life. Whatever may have been his thoughts, they so possessed him that he
observed neither the lapse of time nor whither his feet were carrying
him; he knew only that he had passed far beyond the town limits and was
traversing a lonely region by a road that bore no resemblance to the one
by which he had left the village. In brief, he was “lost.”

Realizing his mischance, he smiled; central New York is not a region of
perils, nor does one long remain lost in it. He turned about and went
back the way that he had come. Before he had gone far he observed that
the landscape was growing more distinct—was brightening. Everything was
suffused with a soft, red glow in which he saw his shadow projected in
the road before him. “The moon is rising,” he said to himself. Then he
remembered that it was about the time of the new moon, and if that
tricksy orb was in one of its stages of visibility it had set long
before. He stopped and faced about, seeking the source of the rapidly
broadening light. As he did so, his shadow turned and lay along the road
in front of him as before. The light still came from behind him. That
was surprising; he could not understand. Again he turned, and again,
facing successively to every point of the horizon. Always the shadow was
before—always the light behind, “a still and awful red.”

Holt was astonished—“dumfounded” is the word that he used in telling
it—yet seems to have retained a certain intelligent curiosity. To test
the intensity of the light whose nature and cause he could not determine,
he took out his watch to see if he could make out the figures on the
dial. They were plainly visible, and the hands indicated the hour of
eleven o’clock and twenty-five minutes. At that moment the mysterious
illumination suddenly flared to an intense, an almost blinding splendor,
flushing the entire sky, extinguishing the stars and throwing the
monstrous shadow of himself athwart the landscape. In that unearthly
illumination he saw near him, but apparently in the air at a considerable
elevation, the figure of his wife, clad in her night-clothing and holding
to her breast the figure of his child. Her eyes were fixed upon his with
an expression which he afterward professed himself unable to name or
describe, further than that it was “not of this life.”

The flare was momentary, followed by black darkness, in which, however,
the apparition still showed white and motionless; then by insensible
degrees it faded and vanished, like a bright image on the retina after
the closing of the eyes. A peculiarity of the apparition, hardly noted
at the time, but afterward recalled, was that it showed only the upper
half of the woman’s figure: nothing was seen below the waist.