The Book of Dreams and Ghosts | Page 8

ride to Edinburgh
next day and make the best bargain he could in the way of compromise.
He went to bed with this resolution, and, with all the circumstances of
the case floating upon his mind, had a dream to the following purpose.
His father, who had been many years dead, appeared to him, he thought,

and asked him why he was disturbed in his mind. In dreams men are
not surprised at such apparitions. Mr. Rutherford thought that he
informed his father of the cause of his distress, adding that the payment
of a considerable sum of money was the more unpleasant to him
because he had a strong consciousness that it was not due, though he
was unable to recover any evidence in support of his belief. 'You are
right, my son,' replied the paternal shade. 'I did acquire right to these
teinds for payment of which you are now prosecuted. The papers
relating to the transaction are in the hands of Mr. ---, a writer (or
attorney), who is now retired from professional business and resides at
Inveresk, near Edinburgh. He was a person whom I employed on that
occasion for a particular reason, but who never on any other occasion
transacted business on my account. It is very possible,' pursued the
vision, 'that Mr. --- may have forgotten a matter which is now of a very
old date; but you may call it to his recollection by this token, that when
I came to pay his account there was difficulty in getting change for a
Portugal piece of gold and we were forced to drink out the balance at a
tavern.'
"Mr. Rutherford awoke in the morning with all the words of the vision
imprinted on his mind, and thought it worth while to walk across the
country to Inveresk instead of going straight to Edinburgh. When he
came there he waited on the gentleman mentioned in the dream--a very
old man. Without saying anything of the vision he inquired whether he
ever remembered having conducted such a matter for his deceased
father. The old gentleman could not at first bring the circumstance to
his recollection, but on mention of the Portugal piece of gold the whole
returned upon his memory. He made an immediate search for the
papers and recovered them, so that Mr. Rutherford carried to Edinburgh
the documents necessary to gain the cause which he was on the verge
of losing."
The story is reproduced because it is clearly one of the tales which
come round in cycles, either because events repeat themselves or
because people will unconsciously localise old legends in new places
and assign old occurrences or fables to new persons. Thus every one
has heard how Lord Westbury called a certain man in the Herald's

office "a foolish old fellow who did not even know his own foolish old
business". Lord Westbury may very well have said this, but long before
his time the remark was attributed to the famous Lord Chesterfield.
Lord Westbury may have quoted it from Chesterfield or hit on it by
accident, or the old story may have been assigned to him. In the same
way Mr. Rutherford may have had his dream or the following 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