“A dream? Oh, a dream only, and does that so astonish you George, as I see it does?” continued Letty.
“Listen then,” said George; “listen, father. It is the most extraordinary thing I ever heard of, though it is but a dream. One thing, however, I observe, the letter must have lain somewhere a good while, it is much out of date.”
“On board the ‘Aurungzebe’ in the Hoogly,
July 4th, 18—.
“My Dear George Woodburn,—I write to you the first line of a letter that I have sent to any one since leaving England; you will see why. We have had a long, but a prosperous voyage. We discharged part cargo at the Cape, and another at the Mauritius, and have just cast anchor here. I have not yet visited Calcutta, that city of palaces, for yesterday as we came to anchor I felt a most unaccountable and gloomy weight oh my spirits. Amid all the bustle of quitting the ship by the passengers and saying good-bye to those who had become so familiar through a long voyage, this weight lay on me. In the night I dreamed a most frightful and extraordinary dream. Now you know that I am not superstitious; that my medical education has made me a firm believer in the invariable prevalence of law in God’s creation. Dreams, visions, stories of apparitions, are all to me furniture of the nursery; and yet how inconsistent I am! Twice in my life I have had dreams so vivid and life-like that, contrary to the ordinary run of my dreams, which I rarely remember, they have remained as clearly and firmly on my mind as actual broad-day facts, and, what is the more wonderful, they were found each to represent something which at the same moment was really passing in a distant place.
“God forbid that this should prove so, but it is exactly of the same kind, and I feel impelled to tell it you at the risk of being laughed at. Certainly I do hope that you will be able to laugh at me. All I ask is that if it be not true, you keep my counsel.
“Well then, I seemed to be somewhere in the great meadows between Woodburn and Beeton. The hay was all abroad, and numbers of people were busily getting it up. It was a splendid, still, reposing evening. I saw Mr. Drury amongst his work-people on his well-remembered tall, roan horse.”
“Oh!” was ejaculated by every one present.
“How odd too,” said George, looking at the date, “and this dream occurred on the night following the death of Mr. Drury. But to proceed.”
“As I looked round I saw two men cross Wink’s Ferry into the meadows, one with a hay-fork in his hand. They seated themselves under the alder bushes near the ferry and on the banks of the river. One of these men I recognised at once. It was that Nathan Hopcraft, who lives just below you, and whose powers of gormandising I have witnessed to my astonishment in your kitchen. His short, thick figure was exact. As usual in hot weather, his shirt-collar and bosom were open, displaying his red, sunburnt, and hairy chest, and his thick, muscular neck, which I remember him once speaking of in his stupid and cart-before-the-horse-way, saying, ‘I have a bull like a neck,’ meaning he had a neck like a bull. There he sat in his shirt sleeves, and with him a man I never saw before. He was a tall, muscular fellow of about thirty. At first view I thought him a keeper, for he had on leather leggings and a velveteen shooting-jacket, with ample skirts and pockets, capable of holding a hare each if necessary. He had black curly hair, and full black whiskers. His face was burnt brown with exposure, and on looking closer his expression was sullen and savage.”
“Oh, heavens!” exclaimed both Letty and her brother together. “Scammel! Scammel to the life! How extraordinary!”