and next moment folded the arms. They had a most uncanny appearance, conveying information, ordering an arrest, or commanding movements of troops, yet quite unintelligible; wrapped in secrecy, the communications not being comprehensible by the men who worked the arms. These clumsy contrivances only disappeared on the invention of the electric telegraph.
Owing to the illness of Admiral Bond, we hurried back to England, to find that he had rallied, but in the autumn Admiral Bond was again dangerously ill with hæmorrhage in the nose that could not be stopped, and he died October 28th, 1839, aged seventy-four years.
Although we retained our house at Bratton, yet, in the summer of 1840, we took the Castle at Bude and spent there some months.
On January 3rd, 1840, at night, my mother was sitting reading her Bible in the dining-room at Bratton, when, looking up, she saw, on the further side of the table, the form of her brother Henry who was in the Navy serving in the South Atlantic. She looked steadily at him, and there was a kindly expression in his face; but presently the apparition faded. She has told me that she realized at once what this meant, and she made an entry in pencil on a fly-leaf at the end of the Bible: "Saw Henry, January 3, 1840." It was not till over a month that the news reached Exeter that he had died on that very date off Ascension. His brother, Commander Francis Godolphin Bond, died at sea near St. Helena, July 16th, 1840. I never heard my mother say that she had seen an apparition of this brother.
