!8 NATURE STUDIES. 



the memory, and they are strong of head and heart, 

 " true peptics who have no system/' as Carlyle says, 

 whose awakened consciousness is not affected by the 

 harmonious or discordant, the painful or pleasant, 

 illusions which have composed their dreams. But 

 while for us they fill an empty moment in the telling, 

 albeit now and again causing fc eerie " feelings, and 

 quickening such remains of superstition as slumber in 

 the majority of us, they are to the untrained intelli- 

 gence of the savage as solid as the experiences of his 

 waking moments, true not only " while they last," but 

 for ever afterwards. And the limits of his language 

 only deepen the confusion within him when he tells 

 what he has seen, and heard, and felt, and whither he 

 has been. For the speech cannot transcend the 

 thought, and therefore can represent neither to him- 

 self nor to his hearers the difference between the 

 illusions of the night and the realities of the day. 

 The dead relations and friends who appear in dreams 

 and live their old life; with whom he joins in the 

 battle or the chase ; with whom, the toils over, he sits 

 down to feast, not, like the Psalmist, in the presence 

 of his enemies, but upon succulent slices of the enemies 

 themselves; the foes with whom he struggles, the 

 wild beasts from which he flees, or in whose grip 

 he feels himself, and, shrieking, awakens his 

 squaw ; the long distances he travels to dreamlands 

 beyond and above are all real, and no "baseless 

 fabric of a vision." The belief is strengthened 

 by that intensified form of dreaming called "night- 



