In Fraser’s Magazine is recorded a very curious story of this sort. If I remember right, an individual had the mortification of discovering every morning when he awoke, that the shirt in which he had slept was gone. Some trick was supposed to have been played upon him by an inmate of the house; and, thinking that the practical joke would soon be abandoned, he went on day after day, till his stock of linen was completely exhausted. The individuals of the family were now anxiously examined, but no tidings of the stray linen could be obtained. It was at last suspected that some depredator had entered the house and unswathed his sleeping victim, and a strict watch was made on the following night. At a suitable hour the somnambulist was seen to quit his bed, to pass through a skylight window to the roof of the house, to enter by another window a garret that was always locked, and to return _shirtless to his lair_. The garret was examined, and the thousand and one shirts were found carefully wrapped up and deposited in a pyramid. Something like this is the story of the spectre of Tappington, in the Ingoldsby legends. The actions, therefore, unlike the ideas of a dream, are often neither heterogeneous nor inconsistent, and it is astonishing to observe the exactness with which the work is executed. Dr. Pritchard tells the case of a farmer who arose, saddled his horse, and rode to market in his sleep: the Archbishop of Bordeaux the case of a student, who composed both theological essays and music thus unconsciously. Now if the dreamer be awakened, he will relate the circumstances of his dream clearly; but the somnambulist, if roused, will generally express himself unconscious of what he intended, or of what he had done. It is, by the bye, often dangerous, on another account, to wake the sleep-walker; indeed, we have recorded the case of a young lady who was walking in a garden in her sleep; she was awoke, and almost instantly died. But in some future somnambulism the same actions will be again performed unheeded. And if there be memory of the sleep-walk, the somnambulist, I believe, always relates his actions as the mere _ideas of a dream_, and is long a sceptic of the _fact_, even if there are visible signs of his exertions.