Woodrow tells of “a popish lady,” living near Boroughbridge, who dreamed that she saw a coach, and a lady in it, almost lost in the river. She directed her servants to watch during two nights, to guard against an accident, but nothing happened. “On the third night, pretty late, the Lady Shawfield came, and of a sudden the coach was overturned, and filled with water. The coachman got upon one of the horses, to save his life. The good and religious Lady Shawfield was for some time under water: and upon the cry rising, the popish lady’s servants came to their assistance. With much difficulty, the coach and lady in it were got out of the water.” And the Lady Shawfield, being laid upon the bank, gradually recovered her senses. In the early months of the Commonwealth, while Mackenzie of Tarbat, afterwards Earl of Cromarty, was riding in a field among his tenants, who were manuring barley, a stranger “called that way on his foot, and stopped likewise, and said to the countrymen, ‘You need not be so busy about that barley, for I see the Englishmen’s horses tethered among it; and other parts mowed down for them.’ Tarbet asked him how he knew them to be Englishmen, and if he had ever seen any of them? He said, ‘No; but he saw them strangers, and heard the English were in Scotland, and guessed it could be no other than they.’ In the month of July, the thing happened directly as the man said he saw it.” The influence exercised on the imagination by events in which we are deeply interested, and the manner in which our hopes or fears are mistaken for predictions, may be illustrated by two examples from antiquity. On the day that Cæsar and Pompey contended at Pharsalia for the mastery of the world, Cornelius, a priest and patrician of Padua, declared, under a sudden impulse of passion, that he beheld the eddies and currents of a desperate battle, and the fall and flight of many of the combatants, eventually exclaiming: “Cæsar has conquered!” His hearers laughed at him, but his words were afterwards verified, and it appeared that he had foretold not only the day, but the incidents, and the result of the famous battle in Thessaly. The anecdote is related on the authority of the “Noctes Atticæ” of Aulus Gellius. Dio Cassius tells a similar story about the assassination of the Emperor Domitian at Rome, by his freedman Stephanus. “It is to be admired,” he says, “that, as accurately proved by persons in either place, Apollonius Thyanæus, ascending an eminence at Ephesus or elsewhere, cried out before the multitude: ‘Well done, Stephanus, well done! Strike the murderer! thou hast struck him, thou hast wounded him, he is slain!’” But it may well be supposed that a secret understanding existed between Apollonius and the murderer. * * * * *