“And pray, what highly imaginative old lady could this dreamer be? But I think you said ‘himself?’”
“Yes, it was a gentleman of this town, my lord.”
“His name is not Bunyan, is it?” asked the judge.
There was a smile on every face both at the bar and in the crowd, and some slight titters amongst the ladies in the gallery.
“Possibly the young gentleman may be descended from the great dreamer of Bedford, but he does not bear his name,” said the counsel; he also looking rather merry over the matter. “He is a learned, and, I understand, a very able and accomplished physician here, who has, moreover, travelled and seen a good deal of the world, moves in the first society, and would be taken to be most perfectly wide awake in general.”
“Very odd,” said the judge. “I would like very much, Mr. Whiteman, to peruse the account, if you happen to have it.”
“Certainly, my lord. I have here an attested copy of the letter containing the dream; and that your lordship may not suppose that the gentleman dreamed the dream after the event, you will note that the letter was written in India on the night following the very evening on which the murder was perpetrated here, so that the gentleman to whom the vision of the night came upon his bed, could not possibly have heard anything of it. And another thing I may note, that the murder was so wholly improbable, that the real perpetrators escaped all suspicion till this dream, and, as it proved, rightly, threw it upon them, having previously caused the most unfortunate arrest and trial of a most unlikely man for a murderer, merely from his having been last seen on the spot.”
“Most extraordinary!” said the judge. “Perhaps, Mr. Whiteman, we don’t understand everything yet, even in this enlightened nineteenth century.”
“No, my lord,” said the barrister, “I certainly do not pretend to understand anything of this sort. I am bound to receive it, as a thoroughly attested fact, and I have much pleasure in handing up to your lordship this singular document.”
The letter was handed across the table by some of the counsel to the judge, and the barrister proceeded:—