rd and fell into an open grave. Telling this to his
parents at "The Pollet," they would not let him go, with a sort of
superstitious wisdom; for, strangely enough, the smack was seized on its
voyage by a privateer, and all the crew and passengers were
consigned--for twelve years--to a French prison! I have heard my father
tell this tale, and noted early how true was Dr. Watts' awkward line,
"On little things what great depend." I might say more about warnings in
dreams and other somnolencies, whereof we all have experiences. For
instance, my "Dream of Ambition" in Proverbial Philosophy was a real
one. And this reminds me now of another like sort of spiritual monition
alluded to in my Proverbial Essay on "Truth in Things False," which has
several times occurred to myself, as this, for example: Years ago, in
Devonshire, for the first time, I was on the top of a coach passing
through a town--I think it was Crediton--and I had the strange feeling
that I had seen all this before: now, we changed horses just on this
side of a cross street, and I resolved within myself to test the truth
of the place being new to me or not, by prophesying what I should see
right and left as we passed; to my consternation it was all as I had
foreseen,--a market-place with the usual incidents. Now, if reasonably
asked how to account for this (and most of us have felt the like), I
reply that possibly in an elevated state of health and spirits the soul
may outrun the body, and literally foresee coming events both real and
ideal. But we must leave this to the Psychical Society for a judgment
upon the famous Horatian philosophy of "more things in heaven and
earth," &c.

* * * * *

On Mr. Galton's topic of hereditary talent I have little to report as to
myself. Neither father nor mother had any leanings either towards verse
or prose; but my mother was an excellent pianiste and a fair landscape
painter both in oils and water-colour; also she drew and printed on
stone, and otherwise showed that she came of an artistic family. As to
my father's surroundings, his brother Peter, a consul-general in Spain,
wrote a tragedy called Pelayo; and I possess half-a-dozen French songs,
labelled by my father "in my late dear father's handwriting," but
whether or not original, I cannot tell. As a Guernseyman, he might well
be as much French as English. They seem to me clever and worthy of
Beranger, though long before him: possibly they