Dreams before the Law Courts.

accused men were dead, their law agent ad mitted confidentially that he had no doubt of their guilt. Singularly enough, a story strikingly simi lar in many of its details found its way before a criminal tribunal in our own century. In the remote and sequestered Highland region of Assynt, Sutherland, a rustic wed ding and merry-making came off in the spring of 1830. At this festivity there figured an itinerant pedler named Murdoch Grant, who from that occasion utterly disappeared. A month afterwards, a farm-servant, passing a lonely mountain lake, observed a dead body in the water, and on its being drawn ashore, the features of the missing pedler were recog nized. He had been robbed, and had met his death by violence. The sheriff of the district, a Mr. Lumsden, investigated the affair with out any result, — in his searches being aided by a well-educated young man of the neigh borhood, one Hugh Macleod, ostensibly a schoolmaster, but then without employment. One day the sheriff, chancing to call at the local post-office, Macleod's name, probably owing to the part he was taking in these in vestigations, came into the conversation, and the postmaster casually remarked that he should not have thought Macleod was so well off, he having recently changed a ten-pound note at his shop. Mr. Lumsden's sus picions were aroused by this, and on his ask ing Macleod a few questions on the matter, he proved the young man to be untruthful. Therefore he put him under arrest, and caused his home to be searched. But none of the pedler's property being found there, and no other suspicious circumstance tran spiring, he was about to be released, when a tailor named Kenneth Fraser came forward with the following extraordinary story. He declared that in his sleep the Macleods' cottage was presented to his mind, and that a voice said to him in Gaelic, " The mer chant's pack is lying in a cairn of stones, in a hole near their house." The directions given in this dream were carried out by the authorities : articles belonging to Grant were

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discovered, and the murdered man's stock ings were presently found in Macleod's pos session. He was accordingly charged with the crime. Kenneth Fraser formulated the evidence of his dream with great firmness and consistency. Macleod was condemned and executed, but not before making a full confession of his guilt. Here, again, as in the case of Mrs. Green wood, we may notice that the dream is only revealed after suspicion had been already aroused. Fraser was a boon companion of Macleod's, and it has been suggested that in their carousings he got some hint of his com rade's terrible secret. A somewhat similar explanation might serve to account for Mc pherson's dream of the murdered English soldier, and even the antique visions of Mrs. Greenwood. The form of a dream was a convenient one in which either to veil a guilty complicity, or in the case of the Highland ers to escape that imputation of being an "informer " which is so hateful to the Celtic heart. There is, however, an equally modern and less remote instance of a similar sort. In 1828, in Suffolk, Maria Martin was slain by her false lover, — a crime known in sensa tional literature as "The Murder in the Red Barn." The stepmother of the deceased (says Mr. Chambers in his " Book of Days ") gave testimony on the trial that she had received in a dream that knowledge of the situation of the body of the victim which led to the detection of the murderer. The late Mr. Serjeant Cox, at a meeting of the Psychological Society in the year 1876, narrated a remarkable case which had come within his own experience in which dreams had played an important part, and the evi dence for which he had himself heard given on oath in open court. A murder had been committed in Somer setshire. A farmer had disappeared and was not to be found. Two different men, living in different villages, some distance from where the farmer had disappeared, both had a dream upon the same night, and stated the particu