Of course, if this "prevision" could be verified in detail, we should come very near to dreams of the future fulfilled. Such a thing-- verification of a detail--led to the conversion of William Hone, the free-thinker and Radical of the early century, who consequently became a Christian and a pessimistic, clear-sighted Tory. This tale of the deja vu, therefore, leads up to the marvellous narratives of dreams simultaneous with, or prophetic of, events not capable of being guessed or inferred, or of events lost in the historical past, but, later, recovered from documents. Of Hone's affair there are two versions. Both may be given, as they are short. If they illustrate the deja vu, they also illustrate the fond discrepancies of all such narratives. {24} THE KNOT IN THE SHUTTER "It is said that a dream produced a powerful effect on Hone's mind. He dreamt that he was introduced into a room where he was an entire stranger, and saw himself seated at a table, and on going towards the window his attention was somehow or other attracted to the window- shutter, and particularly to a knot in the wood, which was of singular appearance; and on waking the whole scene, and especially the knot in the shutter, left a most vivid impression on his mind. Some time afterwards, on going, I think, into the country, he was at some house shown into a chamber where he had never been before, and which instantly struck him as being the identical chamber of his dream. He turned directly to the window, where the same knot in the shutter caught his eye. This incident, to his investigating spirit, induced a train of reflection which overthrew his cherished theories of materialism, and resulted in conviction that there were spiritual agencies as susceptible of proof as any facts of physical science; and this appears to have been one of the links in that mysterious chain of events by which, according to the inscrutable purposes of the Divine will, man is sometimes compelled to bow to an unseen and divine power, and ultimately to believe and live." "Another of the Christian friends from whom, in his later years, William Hone received so much kindness, has also furnished recollections of him. " . . . Two or three anecdotes which he related are all I can contribute towards a piece of mental history which, if preserved, would have been highly interesting. The first in point of time as to his taste of mind, was a circumstance which shook his confidence in _materialism_, though it did not lead to his conversion. It was one of those mental phenomena which he saw to be _inexplicable_ by the doctrines he then held.