far the mysterious efficacy of the royal touch affected my after career
believers in the divine rights and spiritual powers of a king may
speculate as they please. At all events I got a good man's blessing.

I remember also in my nursery days to have heard this curious story of a
dream. My father, when a young man, was a student at Guy's Hospital,
from which school of medicine he went to Yarmouth to attend the wounded
after the battle of Copenhagen. He was on one occasion leaving Guernsey
for Southampton in the clumsy seagoing smack of those days, when, on the
night before embarking, he dreamt that on his way to the harbour he
crossed the churchyard and fell into an open grave. Telling this to his
parents at "The Pollet," they would not let him go, with a sort of
superstitious wisdom; for, strangely enough, the smack was seized on its
voyage by a privateer, and all the crew and passengers were
consigned--for twelve years--to a French prison! I have heard my father
tell this tale, and noted early how true was Dr. Watts' awkward line,
"On little things what great depend." I might say more about warnings in
dreams and other somnolencies, whereof we all have experiences. For
instance, my "Dream of Ambition" in Proverbial Philosophy was a real
one. And this reminds me now of another like sort of spiritual monition
alluded to in my Proverbial Essay on "Truth in Things False," which has
several times occurred to myself, as this, for example: Years ago, in
Devonshire, for the first time, I was on the top of a coach passing
through a town--I think it was Crediton--and I had the strange feeling
that I had seen all this before: now, we changed horses just on this
side of a cross street, and I resolved within myself to test the truth
of the place being new to me or not, by prophesying what I should see
right and left as we passed; to my consternation it was all as I had
foreseen,--a market-place with the usual incidents. Now, if reasonably
asked how to account for this (and most of us have felt the like), I