had a presentiment of death, I have it now; but you know I have for years held that presentiments spring from physical weakness, superstition, or cowardice. Would you yield to these terrible feelings?" He replied, "No! If you do, you will always be a slave to them." After some further conversation he went ashore, and the boat started.
For several hours the dread of disaster overhung me, but gradually wore off, and late at night I fell asleep. The distance from St. Louis to New Orleans is about twelve hundred miles. The time taken by the Luminary was seven days. It was in all respects, after the first day, a delightful voyage. After remaining in New Orleans a few days, I reëmbarked on the same vessel, continuing up the river eight hundred miles, making in all more than two thousand miles without accident.
Since that experience, in many voyages I have made it an object to inquire of travelers and others concerning presentiments, and have found that they are very common, occasionally fulfilled, generally not so; and that it is the tendency with practically all persons who have had one presentiment come true to force themselves into all conversations, and to become tyrants over those dependent upon them or traveling with them. It is to be frankly admitted that no matter how vivid a supposed presentiment might be, its nonfulfilment would not demonstrate that there are no presentiments which must have originated external to
Garfield, and said that she saw him in a railway station, surrounded by ladies and others. But we hear nothing of the seventeen persons who communicated to Andrew Johnson, in the course of the three years that he was President, dreams describing his death by assassination; nor of similar communications made to the late President Arthur.
