tale of St. Augustine's (also cited by Scott) may have been attributed
to him, with the picturesque addition about the piece of Portuguese
gold. Except for the piece of Portuguese gold St. Augustine
practically tells the anecdote in his De Cura pro Mortuis Habenda,
adding the acute reflection which follows. {16}

"Of a surety, when we were at Milan, we heard tell of a certain person
of whom was demanded payment of a debt, with production of his
deceased father's acknowledgment, which debt, unknown to the son, the
father had paid, whereupon the man began to be very sorrowful, and to
marvel that his father while dying did not tell him what he owed when
he also made his will. Then in this exceeding anxiousness of his, his
said father appeared to him in a dream, and made known to him where
was the counter acknowledgment by which that acknowledgment was
cancelled. Which when the young man had found and showed, he not only
rebutted the wrongful claim of a false debt, but also got back his
father's note of hand, which the father had not got back when the
money was paid.

"Here then the soul of a man is supposed to have had care for his son,
and to have come to him in his sleep, that, teaching him what he did
not know, he might relieve him of a great trouble. But about the very
same time as we heard this, it chanced at Carthage that the
rhetorician Eulogius, who had been my disciple in that art, being (as
he himself, after our return to Africa, told us the story) in course
of lecturing to his disciples on Cicero's rhetorical books, as he
looked over the portion of reading which he was to deliver on the
following day, fell upon a certain passage, and not being able to
understand it, was scarce able to sleep for the trouble of his mind:
in which night, as he dreamed, I expounded to him that which he did