AN UNIMPEACHABLE PRESENTIMENT.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] you allow a distant reader to supplement the incident recorded by Mr. Ogi]vy, in the Spectator of December 12th, by another which occurred some years ago within his own experience, and is known to many persons, although it has never been published ? In November, 1880, I was living in a monastery in the North of Scotland, among the community being a young Yorkshireman of two or three and twenty, a candidate for the Order. He was of an ex- ceptionally gay and equable disposition ; hence one or two of us were the more surprised at finding him, on the evening of
November 21st, sitting alone at the piano, looking the reverse of cheerful, and picking out on the keys the melody of a doleful song called "See that my Grave's kept Green." We joked him on his melancholy mood ; but he only answered, "It's true ; I don't know how or why it is, but I feel altogether low and wretched this evening;" refused to be cheered up, and went to bed. Next day (St. Cecily's) he was in his usual good spirits, and went early in the afternoon, with others, to skate on a loch a mile from the abbey. Half an hour later he skated on to a film of thin ice that masked a dangerous spring, fell through, and was drowned. As a rider to the above, I may add that we heard next day that an old woman, whose cottage stood on the braeside near to, and overlooking, the loch, had been down on the morning of November 22nd to the village Board-school, as well as to the little Catholic school, and had warned the teachers not to let the children go on the ice, as she had on the previous night seen "lights floating" on the surface of the loch. I heard her relate this, as well as the fact that when she saw from her door our party on the ice, she turned back (so confident was she of an impending disaster) to get a coil of rope which hung on a ratter of her cottage, and was actually reaching it down when the cries of the drowning youth reached her ears.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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