d men who played important parts in national affairs would
have been entrapped, and turned aside from their purposes.

A gentleman holding a good position in society was awakened by his
wife one night, who told him she had had a most unpleasant dream. She
thought that a friend, who was in the East India Company's service,
had been killed in a duel. She described the place where the duel was
fought, and where the dead body lay. Her husband endeavoured to quiet
her fears, and characterised the dream as an absurdity, produced by a
disturbed imagination. A few months after, the melancholy news reached
this country that the Indian friend had fought a duel, been killed on
the spot, and his body carried to a shed such as the lady had seen in
her dream.

Fastini, a celebrated musician, dreamed one night that he had made a
compact with the devil, who promised to be at his service on all
occasions. He imagined that he presented the devil with his violin, in
order to discover what kind of a musician he was. To Fastini's great
astonishment, Satan, as he thought, played a solo of singular beauty,
which he executed with such superior taste and precision, that it
surpassed all the music he had ever heard or conceived. Fastini awoke
greatly excited, and, taking his violin, composed a piece that
excelled all his other works. He called it the "Devil's Sonata."

Before the marriage of the young Queen of Scotland with the Dauphin of
France, many had strange dreams and visions. Prodigious signs were
also observed in her native country. A comet shone for three months;
rivers dried up in winter, and in summer swelled so high that cattle
were carried away, and villages suddenly destroyed. Whales of enormous
size were cast ashore in the Firth of Forth; hailstones as large as
pigeons' eggs fell in various parts, destroying the crops; and, still
more strange and alarming, a fiery dragon was seen flying low over the
earth, vomiting forth fire, which endangered houses and farmyards.

The dire fatality that attended the Royal Stuarts did not surprise
those who attended to warnings through dreams, signs, and omens. Few
royal families were more unhappy than the Stuarts. James I., after
having been eighteen years a prisoner in England, was, together with
his queen, assassinated by his subjects; James II. was, in the
twenty-ninth year of his age, killed while fighting against England;
James III. was imprisoned by his subjects, and afterwards killed i