A maid-servant, who resided many years in a distinguished family in Edinburgh, was repeatedly warned of the approaching death of certain members of that family, by dreaming that one of the walls of the house had fallen. Shortly before the head of the family sickened and died, she said she had dreamed that the main wall had fallen. A singular circumstance which occurred in this same family, from a member of which I heard it, is mentioned by Dr. Abercrombie. On this occasion the dream was not only prophetic, but the symbol was actually translated into fact. One of the sons being indisposed with a sore throat, a sister dreamed that a watch, of considerable value, which she had borrowed from a friend, had stopped; that she had awakened another sister and mentioned the circumstance, who answered that “something much worse had happened, for Charles’s breath had stopped.” She then awoke, in extreme alarm, and mentioned the dream to her sister, who, to tranquillize her mind, arose and went to the brother’s room, where she found him asleep and the watch going. The next night the same dream recurred, and the brother was again found asleep and the watch going. On the following morning, however, this lady was writing a note in the drawing-room, with the watch beside her, when, on taking it up, she perceived it had stopped; and she was just on the point of calling her sister to mention the circumstance, when she heard a scream from her brother’s room, and the sister rushed in with the tidings that he had just expired. The malady had not been thought serious; but a sudden fit of suffocation had unexpectedly proved fatal. This case, which is established beyond all controversy, is extremely curious in many points of view; the acting out of the symbol, especially. Symbolical events of this description have been often related, and as often laughed at. It is easy to laugh at what we do not understand; and it gives us the advantage of making the timid narrator ashamed of his fact, so that if he do not wholly suppress it, he at least insures himself by laughing, too, the next time he relates it. It is said that Goethe’s clock stopped the moment he died; and I have heard repeated instances of this strange kind of synchronism, or magnetism, if it be by magnetism that we are to account for the mystery. One was told me very lately by a gentleman to whom the circumstances occurred. On the 16th of August, 1769, Frederick II., of Prussia, is said to have dreamed that a star fell from heaven and occasioned such an extraordinary glare that he could with great difficulty find his way through it. He mentioned the dream to his attendants, and it was afterward observed that it was on that day Napoleon was born.