Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 05.pdf/217

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192
The Green Bag.

result,— in his searches being aided by a was a convenient one in which either to veil well-educated young man of the neighbor a guilty complicity, or, in the case of the hood, one Hugh Macleod, ostensibly a Highlanders, to escape that imputation of schoolmaster, but then without employment. being an "informer" which is so hateful to One day the sheriff chancing to call at the the Celtic heart. local post-office, Macleod's name, probably There is, however, an equally modern and owing to the part he was taking in these less remote instance of a similar sort. In investigations, came into the conversation, 1828, in Suffolk, Maria Martin was slain by and the postmaster casually remarked that her false lover,— a crime known in sensational he should not have thought Macleod was so literature as "The Murder in the Red Barn." well off,— he having recently changed a ten j The stepmother of the deceased (says Mr. pound note at his shop. Mr. Lumsden's Chambers in his " Book of Days ") gave suspicions were aroused by this, and on his testimony on the trial that she had received asking Macleod a few questions on the in a dream that knowledge of the situation of matter, he proved the young man to be un the body of the victim which led to the truthful. Therefore he put him under arrest, detection of the murderer. The late Mr. Serjeant Cox, at a meeting of and caused his home to be searched. But none of the pedler's property being found the Psychological Society in the year 1876, there, and no other suspicious circumstance narrated a remarkable case which had come transpiring, he was about to be released when within his own experience in which dreams a tailor named Kenneth Fraser came forward had played an important part, and the evi dence for which he had himself heard given with the following extraordinary story. In his sleep he declared that the Macleods' on oath in open court. A murder had been committed in Somer cottage was presented to his mind, and that setshire. A farmer had disappeared and was a voice said to him in Gaelic, " The merchant's not to be found. Two different men, living pack is lying in a cairn of stones, in a hole in different villages, some distance from near their house." The directions given in where the farmer had disappeared, both had this dream were carried out by the author a dream upon the same night, and stated the ities; articles belonging to Grant were dis particulars to the local magistrates. They covered, and the murdered man's stockings were presently found in Macleod's possession. said they had dreamed on that particular He was accordingly charged with the crime. night that the body was lying in a well in the Kenneth Fraser formulated the evidence of farmyard. No well was known to be there his dream with great firmness and consist at all; so the two men were laughed at. Some ency. Macleod was condemned and executed, persons, however, went to the yard, and but not before making a full confession of although there was no appearance of a well, they at last found one under some manure, his guilt. Here again, as in the case of Mrs. Green and the body was in it; then, of course, on wood, we may notice that the dream is only the principle of the proverb, " He who hides revealed after suspicion had been already can find," the public began to suspect the aroused. Fraser was a boon companion of two men themselves. But it was finally Macleod's, and it has been suggested that in proved that the farmer had been murdered their carousings he got some hint of his by his own two nephews, who had afterward comrade's terrible secret. A somewhat disposed of his body thus. Before these similar explanation might serve to account dreams the dreamers had known nothing for McPherson's dream of the murdered about the well in the yard. The nephews English soldier, and even the antique visions were hanged for their crime. of Mrs. Greenwood. The form of a dream One would ask many questions anent this