Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/363

 Rh Another dream, which has always appeared to me very remarkable, I give in the words of the late Rev. Dawson Warren, vicar of Edmonton, a clergyman with whose family I am closely connected. He recorded it on the authority of his mother, a lady of considerable sense and talents, who had seen the documents upon which its truth was substantiated, and who fully believed it. The dreamer, the Rev. Jacob Duché, a chaplain in America at the time of the Revolutionary War, was compelled to take refuge in England, but returned to his home and family on the re-establishment of peace. When Mr. Duché was returning to America to rejoin his family, and was about halfway across the Atlantic, he dreamed one night that he had landed, arrived in Philadelphia, and was hastening to his home. His house-door appeared to be open; he thought that he ran into his study, and that he found sitting in his own chair his wife, wringing her hands and lamenting the death of their favourite son. She seemed to tell him the painful particulars, and then his grief awakened him. He related his dream to his fellow-passengers and to the captain of the ship, and was so deeply impressed by the circumstance that he wrote out a full account of it, and got it attested by their signatures. On his arrival at Philadelphia he hastened to his house; he found the door open, he flew to his study, he found his wife sitting in his chair, and in an agony of grief she told him of the death of their beloved son, which had taken place at the very time of the dream.

A remarkable discovery of a dead body by a dream took place in my own county in the year 1848, and was narrated in the papers of the day. Mr. Smith, gardener to Sir Clifford Constable, was supposed to have fallen into the Tees, his hat and stick having been found near the waterside, and the river was dragged for some time but without success. A person named Awde, from Little Newsham, a small village four miles from Wycliffe, then dreamt that poor Smith was lying under the ledge of a certain rock about 300 yards below Whorlton Bridge, and that his right arm was broken. The dream so affected this man that he got up early and set out at once to search the river. He went to the boat-house, told his story to the person in charge there,