Abraham Lincoln’s Dream.—The following dream by Abraham Lincoln is a matter of history, and is in harmony with the susceptible nature of that great man. He related it to Mrs. Lincoln and others present in the following words:
“About ten days ago I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches. I could not have been long in bed, when I fell into a slumber and began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of persons were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered down stairs. There the silence was broken by the same sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room. No living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds met me as I passed along. I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find out the cause of a state of things so mysterious, I kept on until I arrived at the ‘end room,’ which I entered. There I met a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon this corpse, whose face was covered; others weeping pitifully, ‘Who is dead at the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers. ‘The President,’ was his answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin!’ Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.”
This occurred but a short time before the event it heralded, which plunged the nation into grief. Had the President given heed to its warning, and not been persuaded by his wife, who gave no credit to the supernatural, the course of events would have been different. Had he heeded the dream it would have been brought forward as evidence to prove the worthlessness of such visions.
A Little Girl Predicts Her own Death.—Little Maud, three-year-old daughter of George T. Ford, of Elmore, Mich., came to her mother one day and said, “Maudie is not going to stay; she is going away off to be buried up in the cold ground.” About a week later, she said, “Let Maudie go and ride with you to-day, for she will never go again.” On the morning of the day of her death, she came to her mother and said, “Maudie don’t feel well. Don’t you feel sorry for Maudie? She is going away off where you will never see her again.” Her mother clasped her to her bosom, wondering what she could mean, but was not long left in doubt. The child grew seriously ill, and later in the day she said, “Good-bye—lift me up—I hear the band playing—I am going now,” and passed away.
Prince Leopold’s Dream.—Another instance, important in consequence of the noble station of the person to whom it relates, is given in the Fortnightly Review, by W. H. Myers:
“The last time I saw Prince Leopold (being two days before he died), he would talk to me about death, and said he would like a military funeral.
“Finally I asked, ‘why do you talk in this morose manner?’ As he was about to answer, he was called away and said, ‘I will tell you later.’ I never saw him to speak to again, but he finished his answer to me to a lady, and said: ‘Two nights now, Princess Alice has appeared to me in my dreams, and says she is quite happy and wants me to come and join her; that is what makes me so very thoughtful.’
“I take this to be a sign of his approaching removal to the world of spirits, in which, as a member of a Spiritualistic family, he has been, from his earliest youth, an implicit believer, thus illustrating the truth of the observation, that, ‘Signs are vouchsafed to the believing, now, as of old.’”
Another Case.—Miss Mary Paine, when on her way to visit some friends in Gainesville, Ga., on passing the Mars Hill Graveyard, ordered her driver to stop the team, which he did. Then she exacted a promise from him that he would bring her back and bury her by the side of her sister Jane. “For,” said she, “I shall never come back alive. I shall die away from home, and I want you to promise to bring me back for burial.” To this declaration she clung, nor would she be persuaded that, as she was in good health she would have a pleasant visit and return home happy. Before three weeks had passed she died of a congestive chill, at her friend’s house in Gainesville, and as she had requested, was brought back to Mars Hill and buried by the side of her dear sister.
Dr. H——, who is of exceedingly skeptical organization, said that he once had an experience which baffled his powers of explanation, and caused him to doubt his materialistic views. He had been called to a distant farm-house on an intensely dark and stormy night to visit a patient. There was a stream with wide marshy borders, across which a narrow causeway had been constructed, barely wide enough for carriages to pass. As he drove onto one end of this narrow way, suddenly there came the thought that he would meet a runaway team, and his horse and carriage be overturned into the morass. At that time of night this was wholly improbable; but the thought came to him instantly with all its contingencies. “If I should meet a team, what shall I do?” he asked himself. Then he thought there was one place wider than the rest, and he answered, “I would reach that place and get as far out of the way as possible.” “Get there, then; get there,” was the urgent impression. He involuntarily hurried his horse, reached the place, and, driving to the very edge, drew rein. He was in a tremor of nervous excitement, yet had seen nor heard nothing to excite him more than the interior impression. But he soon found his haste had not been in vain. He heard the rattle of wheels and clatter of hoofs, as a runaway team struck the further end of the causeway, and in a moment they swept past him. Had they met him unprepared, he certainly would have met with a serious, if not fatal, accident. This intelligence which saw the approaching team and the great danger in which Dr. H. would be placed, was independent of his mind, for it brought a knowledge that mind did not, nor could not know until revealed by some foreign power. Whence came the premonition, the thoughtful care? Not out of the air. It was from an intelligent, individualized entity above and beyond physical existence; and all theories which leave out this element fall short of covering the multitudinous facts which unite and bind them together in a harmonious whole.