foolish if they are not properly expressed. I can tell you after a
fashion what it was that gave us--well, almost a horror of the place when
we were alone. It was towards the evening of one very hot autumn day,
when Frank had disappeared mysteriously about the grounds, and I was
looking for him to fetch him to tea, and going down this path I suddenly
saw him, not hiding in the bushes, as I rather expected, but sitting on
the bench in the old summer-house--there was a wooden summer-house here,
you know--up in the corner, asleep, but with such a dreadful look on his
face that I really thought he must be ill or even dead. I rushed at him
and shook him, and told him to wake up; and wake up he did, with a
scream. I assure you the poor boy seemed almost beside himself with
fright. He hurried me away to the house, and was in a terrible state all
that night, hardly sleeping. Someone had to sit up with him, as far as I
remember. He was better very soon, but for days I couldn't get him to say
why he had been in such a condition. It came out at last that he had
really been asleep and had had a very odd disjointed sort of dream. He
never _saw_ much of what was around him, but he _felt_ the scenes most
vividly. First he made out that he was standing in a large room with a
number of people in it, and that someone was opposite to him who was
"very powerful", and he was being asked questions which he felt to be
very important, and, whenever he answered them, someone--either the
person opposite to him, or someone else in the room--seemed to be, as he
said, making something up against him. All the voices sounded to him very
distant, but he remembered bits of the things that were said: "Where were
you on the 19th of October?" and "Is this your handwriting?" and so on. I
can see now, of course, that he was dreaming of some trial: but we were
never allowed to see the papers, and it was odd that a boy of eight
should have such a vivid idea of what went on in a court. All the time he
felt, he said, the most intense anxiety and oppression and hopelessness
(though I don't suppose he used such words as that to me). Then, after