"They're terrible queer things—dreams," declared the younger. "I've had a few of late. They take hold of you when your mind's more than common full, I reckon."
"Or your stomach—so doctor says. But that's not right. I've stuffed once or twice—greedy like—just for the hope that when I went to sleep I'd be hunting, but it never did anything but keep me awake. No, dreams hang on something we can't understand I reckon; and why the mind won't lie down and sleep with the body, sometimes, but must be off on its own, we can't tell. But there's things said about dreams that ban't true, Lawrence. I read somewhere that you never see the faces of the dead in dreams. That's false. You do see 'em. I saw my brother none so long ago—not as he was when he died, but as a little boy. And dreams be very reasonable in their unreason, you must know, for I was a little boy too. I saw his young face and flaxen hair, and heard him laugh, and we was busy as bees climbing up a fir-tree to a squirrel's dray in a wood. A thing, no doubt, we'd done in life together often enough, sixty years agone; and 'twas put into my dream, and I woke all the better for it."
"Don't you get no sad dreams?" asked Lawrence.
"They come too. They leave you a bit down-daunted, I grant. And some be lost, because you can't call 'em home when you wake up. You'll dream a proper masterpiece sometimes and wake full of it; and yet, for some mysterious working of the brain, 'tis gone, and you try to stretch after it, but never can catch it again. I woke in tears—fancy! Yes, in tears I woke once, long ago now; and for the life of me I didn't know what fetched 'em out of my eyes."
"Perhaps you'd had a cruel bout of pain while you was asleep?"
"No, no; pain don't get tear or groan out of me. I'll never know what it was."
He broke off suddenly, for a previous speech of his visitor gave him the opening he desired.
"You said just now you'd been dreaming, along of your mind, that was more than common full. Was it anything interesting in particular on your mind, or just life in general?"
"Just life as it comes along I reckon."
Enoch regarded him.