A warning of a very similar character may now be narrated, in which the curious point seems to be that it was given so many years before it was needed, though its efficiency was fully made manifest when the actual danger threatened:-- “The Housekeeper of a county family in Oxfordshire dreamt one night that she had been left alone in the house upon a Sunday evening, and that hearing a knock at the door of the chief entrance, she went to it, and there found an ill-looking tramp armed with a bludgeon, who insisted on forcing himself into the house. She thought that she struggled for some time to prevent him so doing, but quite ineffectually; and that being struck down by him and rendered insensible, he thereupon gained ingress to the mansion. On this she awoke. “She at once mentioned her dream to some of her fellow-servants, and also, a few days later, to the Master of the House. The latter, smiling, pooh-poohed it; but remarked that ‘all the greater care should be taken by the servants to see that the fastenings were secure.’ “As nothing happened for a considerable period, the circumstance of the dream was soon forgotten; and, as she herself asserts, had altogether passed away from her mind. However, many years afterwards, this same Housekeeper was left with two other servants to take charge of an isolated mansion at Kensington (subsequently the town residence of the family), when, on a certain Sunday evening, her fellow-servants having gone out and left her alone, she was suddenly startled by a loud knock at the front door. “All of a sudden the remembrance of her former dream returned to her with singular vividness and remarkable force, and she felt her lonely isolation greatly. Accordingly, having at once lighted a lamp on the hall table--during which act the loud knock was repeated with vigour--she took the precaution to go up to a landing on the stair, throw up the window, and there, to her intense terror, she saw in the flesh the very man whom years previously she had seen in her dream, armed with a bludgeon and demanding an entrance. With great presence of mind she went down to the chief entrance, made that and other doors and windows more secure, and then rang the various bells of the house violently, and placed lights in the upper rooms. It was concluded that by these acts the intruder was scared away. It turned out afterwards that the lodge-keeper, having left two children to guard the entrance, they had been terrified into admitting the tramp into the garden; and that the latter had fastened them into the lodge, where they were found in a considerable state of alarm by the two servants on their return home.”[124] Another example of a warning attended to, which had been given in a dream, and acted upon immediately afterwards, comes to the Editor on conclusive evidence of its undoubted truth and authenticity: