But there is another circumstance to be observed in considering the case, which is, that the dreamer is said to have passed some days in a state of intoxication. Now, even supposing this had been true, it is well known that the excitement of the brain caused by intoxication has occasionally produced a very remarkable exaltation of certain faculties. It is by means of either intoxicating draughts or vapors that the soothsayers of Lapland and Siberia place themselves in a condition to vaticinate; and we have every reason to believe that drugs, producing similar effects, were resorted to by the thaumaturgists of old, and by the witches of later days, of which I shall have more to say hereafter. But, as a case in point, I may here allude to the phenomena exhibited in a late instance of the application of ether, by Professor Simpson, of Edinburgh, to a lady who was at the moment under circumstances not usually found very agreeable. She said that she was amusing herself delightfully by playing over a set of quadrilles which she had known in her youth, but had long forgotten them; but she now perfectly remembered them, and had played them over several times. Here was an instance of the exaltation of a faculty from intoxication, similar to that of the woman who, in her delirium, spoke a language which she had only heard in her childhood, and of which, in her normal state, she had no recollection. That the inefficiency of the communication, or presentiment, or whatever it may be, is no argument against the fact of such dreams occurring, I can safely assert, from cases which have come under my own knowledge. A professional gentleman, whose name would be a warrant for the truth of whatever he relates, told me the following circumstance regarding himself. He was, not very long since, at the seaside with his family, and, among the rest, he had with him one of his sons, a boy about twelve years of age, who was in the habit of bathing daily, his father accompanying him to the water-side. This had continued during the whole of their visit, and no idea of danger or accident had ever occurred to anybody. On the day preceding the one appointed for their departure, Mr. H——, the gentleman in question, felt himself after breakfast surprised by an unusual drowsiness, which, having vainly struggled to overcome, he at length fell asleep in his chair, and dreamed that he was attending his son to the bath as usual, when he suddenly saw the boy drowning, and that he himself had rushed into the water, dressed as he was, and brought him ashore. Though he was quite conscious of the dream when he awoke, he attached no importance to it; he considered it merely a dream—no more; and when, some hours afterward, the boy came into the room, and said, “Now, papa, it’s time to go—this will be my last bath”—his morning’s vision did not even recur to him. They walked down to the sea, as usual, and the boy went into the water, while the father