evening at my native town. Here I wandered lost for several hours, making enquiries for my people, who, during my stay abroad, had moved from the place I knew. I had just made up my mind to seek a favourite aunt of mine, who, previous to my leaving England, had been a number of years in one house, and did not then seem likely to leave, when a strange woman in the street where I was making enquiries, recognised me by my likeness to mother, and at once directed me to her place. I knocked on the door and mother, who always was and is full of premonitions, and is very superstitious in the way of signs and dreams, opened the door at once, knew who I was in the dark, though we could not see much of each other's form or face, and, to my surprise, called me by name. "That's me, mother," I said. "Yes," she answered, "I thought it was your knock," just as though I had only been out for an evening's stroll. She said in the course of the evening, that they had all given me up for dead, except herself, and that she had also, three years before, given up all hopes of seeing me again, having had a dream wherein she saw me beat about the head and lying bloody at the feet of strangers. She mentioned the year, and even the month of this year, and a little consideration on my part placed its date with that of the outrage at New Orleans, but I did not then trouble her with an account of this. When I was very small an aunt took me to live with her for a couple or more months in a small town in Gloucestershire, a county in which mother had never been. But she had a dream in which she saw me leaving the house with my uncle's dinner, and that I had to follow the canal bank to his works. She saw me returning that same way, and, beginning to play near the water, fall in head first, she, in her dream, just reaching the spot in time to save me. Early the following morning, after this dream, mother came by train to this village, walked the canal bank to my aunt's house, without enquiring its whereabouts, and demanded her son before he was drowned. There was certainly a possibility of this happening, for I was very small at that time, and the canal was deep. She had never before been in this place, but the locality seemed to be well-known to her as it was seen in her sleep. CHAPTER XVIII OFF AGAIN