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Show A TRUE GHOST ST0EY ) THE OLD WOMAN IN THE QUEER DRESS UNDER AN OAK TREE. She Always Appeared to Announce an Approaching Ap-proaching Death In the Family She Was Probably a Servant Who Had Been Foully Foul-ly Dealt With In Ancient Days. "Everybody laughs in these days at the old story of the Irish banshee, " said a gentleman of national reputation lately late-ly as he chatted with a friend or two in the office of the Continental, "and I am not saying but that it was but a superstition su-perstition after all, though there is a little thing connected with my family that is a strange coincidence, to call it even that "Once, when I was a boy, I woke up during the night weeping bitterly, and when my mother came to my bedside I told her that I had dreamed that a queer-ly queer-ly dressed old woman had come to me under a large oak tree and had warned me that my brother Leonard, who was my senior by several years, was going to die very soon. I noticed then that instead of calming my fears my mother listened to me without saying a word, and presently pres-ently I saw that she, too, was crying as hard as I was. I asked what was the matter, and though she put me off I did not forget the strange effect on her that my dream had produced. "It could not have been a week after that that my brother came in one afternoon after-noon from school and said he was going to join a party of young people in a sleighing excursion to the next town. My mother was very unwilling for him to go and confessed to all sorts of nervous nerv-ous fears, very unlike her usual calm and self reliant self, but my brother insisted and at last went off, followed by my mother's anxious eyes. Within three hours we received a telegram saying say-ing that he had been killed by the horses attached to the sleigh becoming frightened, fright-ened, and, running away near a railroad track had thrown my poor brother under un-der the wheels of a train. "When his mangled body came home, my mother met it, saying to her sister, who was visiting at onr house for the day: 'I knew it, Fanny. BThere saw her the other night,' and for a long time I wondered whs th .'her' referred to could be, I was nearly grown when I again saw the old woman of my boyhood boy-hood dream. I was about to graduate at our home university and was studying hard for the final examinations and was sitting up late one night reading over some questions in mental philosophy when I dropped off to sleep in my chair. ' "Then I dreamed of standing once more under a laige oak tree, which was particularly marked about the bark by a ring about three feet above the ground. Here I was, facing an old woman in a servant's dress of the thirteenth or fourteenth four-teenth century; I should judge, and this old woman was telling me that I would see my father no more in life. I was a good deal worried over this dream, remembering re-membering my former one and its tragic trag-ic sequence, but had ceased to think of it in the hurry and anxiety of the examinations, ex-aminations, when one day old Professor B. called to me as I was passing from one classroom to another and asked, 'EL, isn't your father in Switzerland?' "I replied that he was, for his health had failed so alarmingly for months past that he had been ordered abroad and had been rapidly getting well in the mountains of Switzerland. He had recently joined the English party in an expedition to Mont Blanc and had written-in fine spirits regarding the trip. Professor B. said no more, but I came across in a few minutes a newspaper containing an account of an American who had been killed by falling down a crevasse in the Swiss Alps. "No particulars were known or given by the paper, but I knew oh, yes, I knew that the American was my father, and 6o it proved. I told my widowed mother of the strange coincidence of my second dream, and she replied that the warning would never fail; that it had gone with her through her life, and that her mother had told her that this strange phantom had also given her warning of every disaster she had experienced The old woman, whoever she was, was always al-ways accompanied in her missions of woe by the oak tree marked as I have said. The whole thing is a mystery to us, but it is true, every word of it ' 'If the thing is something supernatural, supernat-ural, none of us has any idea who the woman could have been or why she came like a bird of ill omen to prophesy evil to a plain American family, sans castle, sans legends, sans romanca And I, for one, am particularly interested in why the oak tree should have come down to us in connection with the ehost I would somenow hate to think tnat some doughty ancestor of mine had, after the playful little manner of the good old times, put some faithful servant to death in a way in which an oak tree took a prominent part, but I should not be surprised sur-prised if he did; indeed I have a sneaking sneak-ing belief that that is the true explanation explana-tion of the whole thing, though I am sorry that same servant is so unforgiving unforgiv-ing as to take it out on me by bringing me bad news, which, if she'd only wait long enough, would reach me with proverbial pro-verbial rapidity. ' ' Philadelphia Times. |