ABSTRACT
‘I was a student in King’s College, Aberdeen. It was either my first or my second year there, and my younger brother John was left in the manse, attending school. One night I had been working late at my books before going to bed. I dreamed that my brother, left in the little northern town a hundred miles away, had been clambering over the academy railings, and that, his foot slipping, he fell and impaled himself, suffering an injury which seemed to me in my dream to be fatal or nearly so. In the morning I was so haunted by the recollection that, half in earnest, half in jest, I wrote the whole home. My letter was crossed by one from my mother, telling me that my brother John was dangerously ill, in consequence of a wound which he had received from falling on the spikes while trying to climb the academy railings. He lingered for some time after this news came from Ross-shire to Aberdeen, and then died of the accident. I have heard of many such stories, but this is the only one for which I can personally vouch, and I give it to you at first hand.’
