"You're a man of regular habits?" he observed unexpectedly, with a shade of interrogation in his voice. Mr. Molesworth frowned and tossed his match out of window. "I believe in regular habits myself." Sir John, bent on affability, laid down his newspaper on his knee. "There's one danger about them, though: they're deadening. They save a man the bother of thinking, and persuade him he's doing right, when all the reason is that he's done the same thing a hundred times before. I came across that in a book once, and it seemed to me dashed sound sense. Now here's something I'd like to ask you--have you any theory at all about dreams?" "Dreams?" echoed Mr. Molesworth, taken aback by the inconsequent question. "There's a Society--isn't there?--that makes a study of 'em and collects evidence. Man wakes up, having dreamt that friend whom he knows to be abroad is standing by his bed; lights his candle or turns on the electric-light and looks at his watch; goes to sleep again, tells his family all about it at breakfast, and a week or two later learns that his friend died at such-and-such an hour, and the very minute his watch pointed to. That's the sort of thing." "You mean the Psychical Society?" "That's the name. Well, I'm a case for 'em. Anyway, I can knock the inside out of one of their theories, that dreams are a sort of memory-game, made up of scenes and scraps and suchlike out of your waking consciousness--isn't that the lingo? Now, I've never had but one dream in my life; but I've dreamt it two or three score of times, and I dreamt it last night." "Indeed?" Mr. Molesworth was getting mildly interested. "And I'm not what you'd call a fanciful sort of person," went on Sir John, with obvious veracity. "Regular habits--rise early and to bed early; never a day's trouble with my digestion; off to sleep as soon as my head touches the pillow. You can't call my dream a nightmare, and yet it's unpleasant, somehow." "But what is it?" "Well,"--Sir John seemed to hesitate--"you might call it a scene. Yes, that's it--a scene. There's a piece of water and a church beside it--just an ordinary-looking little parish church, with a tower but no pinnacles. Outside the porch there's a tallish stone cross--you can just see it between the elms from the churchyard gate; and going through the gate you step over a sort of grid--half a dozen granite stones laid parallel, with spaces between." "Then it must be a Cornish church. You never see that contrivance outside the Duchy: though it's worth copying. It keeps out sheep and cattle, while even a child can step across it easily." "But, my dear sir, I never saw Cornwall--and certainly never saw or heard of this contrivance--until I came and settled here, eight years ago: whereas I've been dreaming this, off and on, ever since I was fifteen." "And you never actually saw the rest of the scene? the church itself, for instance?"