I once knew a nobleman who inherited in Italy a palace which he had never seen. There were in it three hundred rooms, and it had belonged to a family which had for six hundred years collected and handed down to their descendants every kind of object, as if they had been magpies or ravens. The heir, as a grave, earnest man, only concerned himself with the armoury and picture gallery and principal rooms. But his young daughter Bertha ranged all over the place and made hundreds of the most singular discoveries. One day she came to me very much delighted. She had found an obscure room or garret, in which there were ranged about on shelves, "sitting up and all looking at her," several hundred old dolls and marionettes. For two hundred years or more the family had kept its old dolls. In this case the father was the waking reason, the rooms the brain cells, and Bertha the sprite who ranges over all and knows where to find forgotten images in store. Many of those whom we meet in dreams are like the ghosts of dolls. This is the only true Night side of Nature, but its shadows and dusky twilight, and strangely-hued chiaroscuros and long pauses of gloom, come constantly into the sunlight of our waking life. Some lives have too much of it, some too little. Some receive it in coarse and evil forms, as lunatics, and sufferers from mania à potu; some canny people--happy Scotchmen, for instance--succeed in banishing it from life as nearly as is possible for a human being to do. Now to speak clearly, and to recapitulate distinctly, I set forth the following propositions:-- I. We have a conscious will which, whether it be an independent incomprehensible spirit, or simply the correlative result or action of all our other brain powers, exists, and during our waking hours directs our thoughts and acts. While it is at work in the world with social influences, its general tendency is towards average common sense. II. This conscious will sleeps when we sleep. But the collective images which form memory, each being indeed a separate memory, as an aggregate of bees' cells form a comb, are always ready to come forth, just as honey is always sweet, limpid, and fluid. There is between them all an associative faculty, or a strange and singular power, which begins to act when the will sleeps. Whether it be also an independent Self which plays capriciously while conscious will sleeps, or a result of correlated forces, it is not as yet possible to determine. What we know is, that it calls forth the images by association, and in a fantastic, capricious manner, imitates and combines what we have experienced, or read, or thought, during our waking hours.