Annie Besant : an autobiography ... / [Annie Wood Besant].

  • Annie Besant
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annie Besant : an autobiography ... / [Annie Wood Besant]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    religious to the very finger-tips, and with a certain faculty for seeing visions and dreaming dreams. This faculty is not uncommon with the Keltic races, and makes them seem superstitious ” to more solidly-built peoples. Thus, on the day of my father’s funeral, my mother sat with vacant eyes and fixed pallid face—the picture comes back to me yet, it so impressed my childish imagination—following the funeral service, stage after stage, and suddenly, with the words, “ It is all over! ” fell back fainting. She said afterwards that she had followed the hearse, had attended the service, had walked behind the coffin to the grave. Certain it is that a few weeks later she determined to go to the Kensal Green Cemetery, where the body of her husband had been laid, and went thither with a relative ; he failed to find the grave, and while another of the party went in search of an official to identify the spot, my mother said, “ If you will take me to the chapel where the first part of the service was read, I will find the grave.” The idea seemed to her friend, of course, to be absurd ; but he would not cross the newly-made widow, so took her to the chapel. She looked round, left the chapel door, and followed the path along which the corpse had been borne till she reached the grave, where she was quietly standing when the caretaker arrived to point it out. The grave is at some distance from the chapel, and is not on one of the main roads ; it had nothing on it to mark it, save the wooden peg with the number, and this would be no help to identi- fication at a distance since all the graves are thus marked, and at a little way off these pegs are not