258|The Green Bag.|}}

She was executed amid the greatest excite ment throughout the metropolis; and on a warm July day she was borne, amid the sor rowing faces of ten thousand spectators, and her pall upheld by six young girls robed in white, from her humble home to the grave yard of the Foundling Hospital. One who lived amid those scenes wrote, long after : "Poor Eliza Fenning! So young, so fair, so innocent! Cut down even in thy morn

ing with all life's brightness only in its dawn! Little did it profit thee that a city mourned over thy early grave, and that the most eloquent men did justice to thy memory!" For more than half a century the guilt or innocence of Eliza Fenning was a disputed point Then the confession of the real mur derer came out, and her innocence was estab lished beyond a doubt.

DREAMS BEFORE THE LAW COURTS. TN the year 1695 a Mr. Stockden was robbed and murdered in his own house in the parish of Cripplegate. There was rea son to believe that his assailants were four in number. Suspicion fell on a man named Maynard, but he succeeded at first in clear ing himself. Soon afterwards a Mrs. Green wood voluntarily came forward and declared that the murdered man had visited her in a dream, and had shown her a house in Thames Street, saying that one of the murderers lived there. In a second dream he displayed to her a portrait of Maynard, calling her atten tion to a mole on the side of his face (she had never seen the man), and instructing her con cerning an acquaintance who would be, he said, willing to betray him. Following up this information, Maynard was committed to prison, where he confessed his crime and im peached three accomplices. It was not easy to trace these men; but Mr. Stockden, the murdered man, again opportunely appeared in Mrs. Greenwood's dreams, giving informa tion which led to the arrest of the whole gang, who then freely confessed and were finally executed. The story is related by the curate of Cripplegate, and "witnessed" by Dr. Sharp, then Bishop of York. On this story, be it remarked that Mrs. Greenwood's dreams only verified suspicions already aroused. Maynard had been sus pected at first; her dream brought home

the guilt to him. It did not deal with his accomplices until Maynard, in his turn, had implicated them. A somewhat similar incident came before a legal tribunal nearly a century afterwards, when two Highlanders were arraigned for the murder of an English soldier in a wild and solitary mountain district known as " the Spital of Glenshee." In the course of the "proof for the Crown," to use the phrase of Scottish law, another Highlander, one Alex ander McPherson, deposed that on one night an apparition appeared to come to his bed side, and announced itself as the murdered soldier, Davies, and described the precise spot where his bones would be found, re questing McPherson to search for and bury them. He fulfilled but the first part of the behest, whereupon the dream or apparition came back, repeated it, and called its mur derers by their names. It appears that, with the strangely stern common-sense which in Scotland exists side by side with the strongest imaginative power, the prisoners were acquitted principally on account of this evidence, whose " visionary" nature threw discredit on the whole proceed ings. One difficulty lay in the possibility of communication between the murdered man and the dreamer, since the one spoke only English and the other nothing but Gaelic! Years afterwards, however, when both the