Far more interesting, and occasionally productive of good results, are dreams which might be called retrospective, inasmuch as they reveal events of the past, which stand in some connection with present or impending necessities. Many of these, no doubt, arise simply from the recovery of forgotten facts in our memory; others, however, cannot be thus explained. Justinus tells us of Dido's dream, in which she saw her departed husband, Sichæus, who pointed out to her his concealed treasures and advised her to seek safety in flight. St. Augustine also has an account of a father who after death appeared to his son and showed him a receipted account, the loss of which had caused his heir much anxiety. (_De cura pro mortuis_, ch. xi.) After Dante's death the thirteenth canto of his Paradise could nowhere be found, and the apparent loss filled all Italy with grief and sorrow. His son, Pietro Alighieri, however, saw a long time afterwards, in a dream, his father, who came to his bedside and told him that the missing papers were concealed under a certain plank near the window at which he had been in the habit of writing. It was only when all other researches had proved vain, that, attention was paid to the dream; but when the plank was examined the canto was found in the precise place which the dream had indicated. A similar dream of quite recent occurrence was accidentally more thoroughly authenticated than is generally the case with such events. The beautiful wife of Baron Alphonse de Rothschild of Paris had lost a valuable ring while hunting in the woods near her castle of Ferrières. It so happened that early associations made the jewel specially dear to her, and she felt the loss grievously; a reward of fifteen hundred francs was, therefore, offered at once for its recovery. The night after the hunt, the daughter of one of the keepers saw in a dream an unknown man of imposing appearance, who told her to go at daybreak to a certain crossroad in the forest, where she would find the ring at the foot of a beech-tree, close to the highway. She awakes, dresses herself at once, and goes to the place of which she has dreamed; after half an hour's walk she reaches the crossroads and almost at the same moment sees something glittering and shining like a firefly, picks it up, and behold! it is the ring. The girl had not even seen the hunt, nor did she know anything of the loss of the jewel; the whole occurrence, and the place where it was lost, all were pointed out to her in her dream. (_Le Monde Illustré_, Dec. 15, 1860).