he
electric-light and looks at his watch; goes to sleep again, tells his
family all about it at breakfast, and a week or two later learns that his
friend died at such-and-such an hour, and the very minute his watch
pointed to. That's the sort of thing."

"You mean the Psychical Society?"

"That's the name. Well, I'm a case for 'em. Anyway, I can knock the
inside out of one of their theories, that dreams are a sort of
memory-game, made up of scenes and scraps and suchlike out of your waking
consciousness--isn't that the lingo? Now, I've never had but one dream in
my life; but I've dreamt it two or three score of times, and I dreamt it
last night."

"Indeed?" Mr. Molesworth was getting mildly interested.

"And I'm not what you'd call a fanciful sort of person," went on Sir John,
with obvious veracity. "Regular habits--rise early and to bed early;
never a day's trouble with my digestion; off to sleep as soon as my head
touches the pillow. You can't call my dream a nightmare, and yet it's
unpleasant, somehow."

"But what is it?"

"Well,"--Sir John seemed to hesitate--"you might call it a scene.
Yes, that's it--a scene. There's a piece of water and a church beside
it--just an ordinary-looking little parish church, with a tower but no
pinnacles. Outside the porch there's a tallish stone cross--you can just
see it between the elms from the churchyard gate; and going through the
gate you step over a sort of grid--half a dozen granite stones laid
parallel, with spaces between."

"Then it must be a Cornish church. You never see that contrivance outside
the Duchy: though it's worth copying. It keeps out sheep and cattle,
while even a child can step across it easily."

"But, my dear sir, I never saw Cornwall--and certainly never saw or heard
of this contrivance--until I came and settled here, eight years ago:
whereas I've been dreaming this, off and on, ever since I was fifteen."

"And you never actually saw the rest of the scene? the church itself, for
instance?"

"Neither stick nor stone of it: I'll take my oath. Mind you, it isn't
_like_ a church made up of different scraps of memory. It's just that
particular church, and I know it by heart, down to a scaffold-hole, partly
hidden with grass, close under the lowest string-course of the tower,
facing the gate."

"And inside?"

"I don't know. I've never been inside. But stop a moment--you haven't
heard the half of it yet! There's a road comes downhi