Two men were in the way of Stevenson's marriage--his father and his loved one's husband, Mr. Osbourne. Stevenson wanted these men out of the way; they were the obstacles to his happiness. He wished that Mr. Osbourne were divorced and he entertained bitterness towards his father for showing such animosity to the match. Now we are not accusing Stevenson of a crime when we say that unconsciously the thought may have come to him if one or both of these men were dead his road to marriage would be easy. The dream of the murder of the father by the son is understood by all Freudians. It is not an uncommon one, especially where there is ill feeling between son and father, or where an over-attachment exists for the mother. It has its origin psychically in infancy when the father was looked upon as a rival of the infant in the affections of the mother, and the dream is given additional grounds for its entry when the relations between father and son continue or grow strained. It represents just what it portrays, the wish of the child for the father to be out of the way, or dead. When the child wishes some one dead he means he wants him absent; he has no conception of death. The dream of murdering one's own father then is evidence of hostile feeling entertained by the dreamer to his father either in infancy, where it is always entertained, or later in life. It represents a wish of the unconscious fulfilled, the removal of an obstacle to happiness. Needless to say it does not represent a conscious desire on the part of the dreamer in his waking hours to kill his father. We know how strained Stevenson's relations with his father were. The elder Stevenson was not sympathetic to his son's liberal ideas and later he opposed him in his lovemaking. Two more serious oppositions to a young man, one to the inclinations of his intellect and the other to his love, can not be imagined. The novelist never realised what the feature of the murder of his father in his dream meant, and how it arose. If in his dream his father appeared as rich and wicked with a damnable temper, that is what Stevenson really thought his father was. In the dream the son lived abroad to avoid the father, and this Stevenson also actually did in life, and as a result, by the way, we have some of his early books of travel, and I dare say if these were closely examined evidence of his strained relations with his father would appear.