Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/635

 . 28, 1863.] but one cable’s length further on the course she was steering in the night she would have gone ashore.

There is a singular dream recorded in “Warley’s Wonders of the Little World,” of an English gentleman residing in Prague. He was lying in bed one morning, when he dreamed that a shadow appeared to him, and told him that his father was dead. He awoke in great alarm, and taking his diary, made an entry of the circumstance, with the day and hour when it took place. This book, with many other things, he put into a barrel and sent to England. Going from Prague to Nuremberg, he met at the latter place a merchant who had come from England, and who knew his family well. This gentleman told him that his father was dead. Four years later he himself reached this country; but, before he would touch the barrel he had sent from Prague, he procured the attendance of his sisters and some friends, and in their presence opened the barrel, took out the book, and called their attention to the entry. To the astonishment of all present, the date was that of the day on which his father died. This same gentleman says: “I may lawfully swear, that in my youth, at Cambridge, I had a like dream of my mother’s death; where, my brother Henry, lying with me, early in the morning, I dreamed that my mother passed by with a sad countenance, and told me ‘that she could not come to my commencement’ (I being within five months to proceed Master of Arts, and she having at that time promised to come to Cambridge). When I related this dream to my brother, both of us waking together in a sweat, he protested to me that he had dreamed the very same; and when we had not the slightest knowledge of our mother’s sickness, neither in our youthful affections were any whit moved with the strangeness of this dream, yet the next carrier brought us word of our mother’s death.”

The dream related by Sir Walter Scott must be so well known, that we hesitate to repeat it; but we will do so, because we think it is susceptible of explanation. Mr. R., of Bowland, a gentleman of property in the Vale of Gala, was prosecuted for a very considerable sum, the accumulated arrears of tiend, for which he was said to be indebted to a noble family (the titulars). Mr. R. was strongly impressed with the belief that his father had, by a form of process peculiar to the law of Scotland, purchased those lands from the titular, and, therefore, that the present prosecution was groundless. But after an industrious search among his father’s papers, an investigation of the public records, and a careful inquiry among all persons who had transacted law-business for his father, no evidence could be recovered to support his defence. The period was now near at hand when he conceived the loss of the lawsuit to be inevitable, and he had formed the determination to ride to Edinburgh next day, and make the best bargain he could in the way of compromise. He even went to bed with this resolution; and, with all the circumstances of the case floating upon his mind, had a dream to the following purport: His father, who had been many years dead, appeared to him, he thought, and asked him why he was disturbed in his mind. In dreams men are not surprised at such apparitions. Mr. R. thought he informed his father of the cause of his distress, adding that the payment of a considerable sum of money was the more unpleasant to him, because he had a strong consciousness that it was not due, though he was unable to acquire any evidence in support of his belief. “You are right, my son,” replied the paternal shade; “I did acquire right to these tiends for payment of which you are now prosecuted. The papers relating to the transaction are in the hands of Mr., a writer, who is now retired from professional business, and resides at Inveresk, near Edinburgh. He was a person whom I employed on that occasion for a particular reason, but who never on any other occasion transacted business on my account. It is very possible that Mr. may have forgotten a matter which is now of a very old date, but you may call it to his recollection by this token,—that when I came to pay his account, there was difficulty in getting change for a Portugal piece of gold, and that we were forced to drink out the balance at a tavern.” Mr. R. awoke in the morning, with all the words of the vision imprinted on his mind, and thought it worth his while to ride across the country to Inveresk, instead of going straight to Edinburgh. When he came there he waited on the gentleman mentioned in the dream; and, without saying a word of the vision, he inquired whether he remembered the circumstance, which after some consideration he did, and produced the papers. There is every probability, in this case, that Mr. R. had been told this by his father when he was very young, and, from not understanding the importance of the information, had paid so little attention to it that he had quite forgotten it. That incidents of old date, totally forgotten in our waking moments, frequently recur to the memory during sleep, we have most of us experienced.

The belief that dreams reveal events that have happened, or which are about to happen, had doubtless been much weakened of late years by reading; but it may be questioned whether it is not now almost as strong as ever it was, owing to the publication, in the “Times” and other papers, of the case of a man who dreamed more than once that he had seen the body of a man hanging in a barn, which dream impressed itself so strongly upon his mind, that in the morning he went to the barn he had seen in his dream, and there found a man hanging. There was another instance, published in the same journal subsequently, of a man who dreamed that the body of one who had been missing for some time lay under water on a certain part of the coast, where indeed it was found.

A very circumstantial account is given of two friends, who entered a town together, but being unable to get accommodation in the same inn, separated. In the middle of the night one of them heard his friend calling to him for help. He awoke from his sleep, but finding it was only a dream, he immediately went to sleep again; but awoke, directly after he had fallen asleep, by hearing, as it appeared to him, his friend’s cries for