even months, after the mind, calmly reflecting, rejects the idea that there is any cause for the depression. A common experience of foreign travelers is that the mind runs over the whole field of personal interest, illuminating it as with flashes, bringing before him who pursues his way "remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow," vivid thoughts of home and friends. Such pensive states are often accompanied by intense concern, which crystallizes into conviction, that death or some other calamity has already taken place. Thousands of letters and many telegraphic despatches inspired by such feelings cross the sea every summer, to elicit responses indicating that there is no occasion for anxiety. Many business men will also acknowledge that at different times in the course of their careers, for reasons which they have not been able to fathom, an impression of impending calamity has possessed them, which was so strong as to make them ready to dispute the truth of the trial balance showing them solvent and prosperous.
The observation of the reader will doubtless furnish instances of persons whose forebodings of calamity—sometimes confirmed by the event, but oftener otherwise—are recognized by their business partners and friends, and call for the exercise of patience and the use of every means to dissipate the mysterious, unwelcome, and paralyzing impression. A manufacturer whose name is known in every city in the Union, and in most foreign countries, whose riches are estimated at many millions, employees numbered by thousands, charities munificent, piety undoubted, and sanity unquestioned, has had presentiments of disaster a score of times within the last twenty-five years, not one of which has been fulfilled; but all, while they lasted, were as intense and over-powering as any could be.
