ircumstances, it is scarcely extraordinary that
it should have effected the same portion of the brain, and caused a
certain similarity in our dreams. In all nightmares something terrible
happens, or is on the point of happening; and so it was here. Not
unnaturally in both our cases our thoughts turned to soldiers. If you
remember, there was a talk at mess some little time since as to what
would happen in the extremely unlikely event of the Sepoys mutinying in
a body. I have no doubt that was the foundation of both our dreams. It
is all natural enough when we come to think it over calmly. I think,
by the way, we had better agree to say nothing at all about it in the
regiment.'

"' I should think not,' Charley said. 'We should never hear the end of
it; they would chaff us out of our lives.'

"We kept our secret, and came at last to laugh over it heartily when we
were together. Then the subject dropped, and by the end of a year had as
much escaped our minds as any other dream would have done. Three months
after the affair the regiment was ordered down to Allahabad, and the
change of place no doubt helped to erase all memory of the dream. Four
years after we had left Jubbalpore we went to Beerapore. The time is
very marked in my memory, because, the very week we arrived there, your
aunt, then Miss Gardiner, came out from England, to her father, our
colonel. The instant I saw her I was impressed with the idea that I knew
her intimately. I recollected her face, her figure, and the very tone
of her voice, but wherever I had met her I could not conceive. Upon the
occasion of my first introduction to her I could not help telling her
that I was convinced that we had met, and asking her if she did not
remember it. No, she did not remember, but very likely she might have
done so, and she suggested the names of several people at whose houses
we might have met. I did not know any of them. Presently she asked how
long I had been out in India?

"'Six years,' I said.

"'And how old, Mr. Harley,' she said, 'do you take me to be?'

"I saw in one instant my stupidity, and was stammering out an apology,
when she went on:

"'I am very little over eighteen, Mr. Harley, although I evidently look
ever so many years older; but papa can certify to my age; so I was only
twelve when you left England.'

"I tried in vain to clear matters up. Your aunt would insist that I
took her to be forty, and the fun that my blunder made rather drew us
t