That vacation put a gay finish on my first year in Paris. I began the second in deep depression, for several good reasons. First, I had exhausted my reserve. I think I came back from my vacation with twenty francs in my pocket. All my American associates were gone or going soon. I had a new address, for Madame Bonnet had moved from the neighborhood of the Musée Cluny to the more somber neighborhood of the Panthéon and, hardest of all, I knew now that instead of one year more I must have at least two to finish my undertaking. The homesickness and hunger for my family had never been appeased. I had lived on their letters. If they did not come regularly I scolded and wailed; I begged for details of their daily life. My mother was an intimate letter writer, delightfully frank about her neighbors and about the family. She told who was at church, fretted because father spent so much time with his precious Sunday school class of girls, described every new frock, told what they had for Sunday dinner, announced the first green corn in the garden, the blossoming of her pet flowers—snowdrops and primulas and iris in the spring, roses in the summer, anemones in the fall, cactus in the winter. Occasionally she would apologize for her homely details, particularly after I had written a long guidebookish epistle home describing some ancient monument I had been visiting. How I must have bored them sometimes! But home details—“I live off them,” I told her. “You can’t tell me too much about your daily doings.”
This feeling about my family made me a sensitive receiving plate and accounts, I suppose, for the only proof I personally have ever had of the possibilities in telepathy. This came the first Sunday of June, 1892. I had hardly taken my coffee when I fell prey to a most unaccountable alarm. What it was about, I did not know. I could not work and finally went to the street. For hours I walked, not able to throw off the black thing that enveloped me. It was late in the afternoon when I returned to find a compatriot with a letter of introduction waiting. As he was leaving the apartment after his call I picked up my daily copy of _Le Temps_ and as I always did turned first to the news from _les Etats Unis_. It was to read that the city of Titusville and its neighbor Oil City had been utterly destroyed by flood and fire. The only buildings left in my home town were said to be the railroad station and a foundry. A hundred and fifty persons had been drowned or burned to death—the inhabitants had taken to the hills.