I fear it is not a very interesting dream in itself, but that I did not promise. Surely it is one that answers the description given at the outset, and illustrates the species somewhat elaborately. Can any one imagine a person when awake making up such a story, planning so many details of it so carefully, without an inkling in his mind of the explanation that was to come to clear up all the mystery in the end? I do not believe so. But if not, how can one do in a dream a thing so impossible in a wakeful state? I, the dreamer, involve myself in a story in which I fabricate a series of occurrences incomprehensible to me unless I have the key that explains them, a series that nobody could well string together unless he had that key. One would say that I must have had the key in my possession as I pieced together the occurrences. Well, then, how could I be totally perplexed at those occurrences as they were happening, and how could I be astounded and provoked to laughter when I produced my own explanation of them? This is surely too much like believing that a magician will be amazed at his own trick. Let me recount one other dream of this variety, a shorter one but possibly even more pointed. As it occurred to me some months ago, and as it comprises only an after-dinner speech, I cannot now pretend to report the words of it with literal accuracy. But that is not necessary if the reader will take my assurance that though I do not give the precise words of the speech as I heard it in the dream, I offer a version similar enough to be quite as satisfactory for the present purpose, and differing in no point of principle from the original. The very vacuity of the present version will be sufficient evidence, I hope, of my endeavor to be as faithful as possible to the original. I even feel that I must request the reader not to be disdainful of the puns that embellish the oration, since it is something other than the art of rhetoric that is here in question. "Ladies and gentlemen," said the speaker, a man who by the way is celebrated as a post-prandial artist, but who need not be blamed in person for this coruscation, "we have with us this evening a man who bears an honorable and formidable name, a name which, in at least one person who possessed it, is enrolled on the tablets of immortality. It is a bellicose name, and therefore timely enough. But it need make no one tremble, since its most illustrious possessor loved to make the world shake with laughter as well as wince before the levelled spear of his sarcasm. I will not say that our guest of the evening has all the talents of what a tipsy man might call his great 'name-shake;' but I will answer for it that he can himself give a good imitation of what our school-boys sometimes call the 'music of the spears.' However, I will 'no be speiring,' as the Scotch say, into their further similarities; I prefer simply to present to you, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Shakespeare."