of men staggering home in midnight hours from tavern haunts.  Disturbed dreams were, it is not improbable, a fruitful source of delusion.  A large part of the evidence is susceptible of explanation by the supposition, that the witnesses had confounded the visions of their sleeping, with the actual observations and occurrences of their waking hours.  At the trial of Susanna Martin, it was in evidence, that one John Kembal had agreed to purchase a puppy from the prisoner, but had afterwards fallen back from his bargain, and procured a puppy from some other person, and that Martin was heard to say, “If I live, I will give him puppies enough.”  The circumstances seem to me to render it probable, that the following piece of evidence given by Kembal, and to which the Court attached great weight, was the result of a nightmare occasioned by his apprehension and dread of the fulfilment of the reported threat:—­

“I, this deponent, coming from his intended house in the woods to Edmund Elliot’s house where I dwelt, about the sunset or presently after; and there did arise a little black cloud in the north-west, and a few drops of rain, and the wind blew pretty hard.  In going between the house of John Weed and the meeting-house, this deponent came by several stumps of trees by the wayside; and he by impulse he can give no reason of, that made him tumble over the stumps one after another, though he had his axe upon his shoulder which put him in much danger, and made him resolved to avoid the next, but could not.

“And, when he came a little below the meeting-house, there did appear a little thing like a puppy, of a darkish color.  It shot between my legs forward and backward, as one that were dancing the hay.[A] And this deponent, being free from all fear, used all possible endeavors to cut it with his axe, but could not hurt it; and, as he was thus laboring with his axe, the puppy gave a little jump from him, and seemed to go into the ground.

“In a little further going, there did appear a black puppy, somewhat bigger than the first, but as black as a coal to his apprehension, which came against him with such violence as its quick motions did exceed his motions of his axe, do what he could.  And it flew at his belly, and away, and then at his throat and over his shoulder one way, and go off, and up at it again another way; and with such quickness, speed, and violence did it assault him, as if it would tear out his throat or his belly.  A good while, he was without fear; but, at last, I felt my heart to fail and sink under it, that I thought my life was going out.  And I recovered myself, and gave a start up, and ran to the fence, and calling upon God and naming the name Jesus Christ, and then it invisibly away.  My meaning is, it ceased at once; but this deponent made it not known to anybody, for fretting his wife."[B]

[Footnote A:  Love’s Labour’s Lost, act v., sc. 1.]