aper that I had seen in my
dream on the Monday night.

"Nothing similar to it happened to me before or since. The above fact
has never been recorded in any publication."

_Forebodings and Dreams._

An instance in which a dream was useful in preventing an impending
catastrophe is recorded of a daughter of Mrs. Rutherford, the
granddaughter of Sir Walter Scott. This lady dreamed more than once that
her mother had been murdered by a black servant. She was so much upset
by this that she returned home, and to her great astonishment, and not a
little to her dismay, she met on entering the house the very black
servant she had met in her dream. He had been engaged in her absence.
She prevailed upon a gentleman to watch in an adjoining room during the
following night. About three o'clock in the morning the gentleman
hearing footsteps on the stairs, came out and met the servant carrying a
quantity of coals. Being questioned as to where he was going, he
answered confusedly that he was going to mend the mistress's fire, which
at three o'clock in the morning in the middle of summer was evidently
impossible. On further investigation, a strong knife was found hidden in
the coals. The lady escaped, but the man was subsequently hanged for
murder, and before his execution he confessed that he intended to have
assassinated Mrs. Rutherford.

A correspondent in Dalston sends me an account of an experience which
befell him in 1871, when a lady strongly advised him against going from
Liverpool to a place near Wigan, where he had an appointment on a
certain day. As he could not put off the appointment, she implored him
not to go by the first train. In deference to her foreboding, he went by
the third train, and on arriving at his destination found that the first
train had been thrown off the line and had rolled down an embankment
into the fields below. The warning in this case, he thinks, probably
saved his life.

Another correspondent, Mr. A. N. Browne, of 19, Wellington Avenue,
Liverpool, communicates another instance of a premonitory dream, which
unfortunately did not avail to prevent the disaster:

"My sister-in-law was complaining to me on a warm August day, in 1882,
of being out of sorts, upset and altogether depressed. I took her a bit
to task, asked her why she was depressed, and elicited that she was
troubled by dreaming the preceding night that her son Frank, who was
spending his holidays with his uncle near Preston, was dro