if it involves a voyage or a long journey, to be haunted by some vague premonition of coming evil. If all goes well, they afterwards laugh and forget the foreboding; if evil comes, they or their friends remember it forever. This is, at any rate, the commonest and easiest explanation of such emotions, but if ever there was a case where the solicitude seemed to amount to a prediction, it was in regard to the voyage of the Ossolis. Italians are apt to dread the sea, and Ossoli had been cautioned to beware of it by one who had told his fortune when a boy. His wife, on the other hand, had cherished a superstition that the year 1850, probably as being the middle of the century, would be a marked epoch in her life. But there were more definite omens and warnings, or what passed for such. On April 6 Madame Ossoli wrote to her friend, the Marchioness Visconti Arconati: —
“I am absurdly fearful about this voyage. Various little omens have combined to give me a dark feeling. Among others, just now we hear of the wreck of the Westmoreland bearing Powers’ ‘Eve.’ Perhaps we shall live to laugh at these. But in case of mishap I should perish with my husband and child, perhaps to be transferred to some happier state.”[1]
Again she wrote to Madame Arconati (April 21, 1850): —
“It was an odd combination. I had intended, if I went by way of France, to take the packet ship Argo
- ↑ MS.
