Mary rocked herself to and fro and laughed loudly for delight, and
then they ate a bit of everything, and were very happy.
Mrs. Makebelieve said that she felt altogether better that morning.
She had slept like a top all through the night, and, moreover, had a
dream wherein she saw her brother Patrick standing on the remotest sea
point of distant America, from whence he had shouted loudly across the
ocean that he was coming back to Ireland soon, that he had succeeded
very well indeed, and that he was not married. He had not changed in
the slightest degree, said Mrs. Makebelieve, and he looked as young
and as jolly as when he was at home with her father and herself in the
County Meath twenty-two years before. This mollifying dream and the
easy sleep which followed it had completely restored her health and
spirits. Mrs. Makebelieve further intimated that she intended to go to
work that day. It did not fit in with her ideas of propriety that her
child should turn into a charwoman, the more particularly as there was
a strong--an almost certain--possibility of an early betterment of her
own and her daughter's fortunes.
Dreams, said Mrs. Makebelieve, did not come for nothing. There was
more in dreams than was generally understood. Many and many were the
dreams which she herself had been visited by, and they had come true
so often that she could no longer disregard their promises,
admonishments or threats. Of course many people had dreams which were
of no consequence, and these could usually be traced to gluttony or a
flighty inconstant imagination. Drunken people, for instance, often
dreamed strange and terrible things, but, even while they were awake,
these people were liable to imaginary enemies whom their clouded eyes
and intellects magnified beyond any thoughtful proportions, and when
they were asleep their dreams would also be subject to this haze and
whirl of unreality and hallucination.
Mary said that sometimes she did not dream at all, and at other times
she dreamed very vividly, but usually could not remember what the
dream had been about when she awakened, and once she had dreamed that
some one gave her a shilling which she placed carefully under her
pillow, and this dream was so real that in the morning she put her
hand under the pillow to see if the shilling was there, but it was
not. The very next night she dreamed the same dream, and as she put
the phantom money under her pillow she said out loudly to herself, "I
am dreaming this, and I dreamt it last night also." Her mother said if
she had dreamt it for the third time some one would have given her a
shilling surely. To this Mary agreed, and admitted that she had tried
very hard to dream it on the third night, but somehow could not do it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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