my people's dreams. It is true I told my prophet that were an angel from heaven, let alone a man risen from the dead, to preach any other doctrine than that of Jesus Christ, I should not believe, and equally I urged upon my hearers that God had already called them by His Son; but I read to them the Scriptures, and I spoke to them of saints, and they knew that if they told me they had seen an angel in the way, I should at least be reverent. So indeed did angels throng about us. So did we see in the night visions. I relate them almost without comment. A normal explanation may cover them all. For myself, I can only repeat that there is little of the normal that seems to me on that account any the less of God.

In the first place, the native dreams frequently of the dead. So far as I know them, the Basuto, in common with most South African natives, have no definite theology at all as to departed spirits. Tribes and individuals exhibit occasionally more or less complete beliefs, and these often find their way into books of comparative religion; but taken as a whole the hereafter is as shadowy to a native as it is to the modern European. He certainly believes in a soul, but he has not defined its measure of immortality or of personality, or come to any conclusion as to its residence hereafter or manner of life. A few suggestions, however, emerge from the dreams that have come to my knowledge. Thus I have not known a native to dream of one long dead. I have not known him to visit any place of the dead (as distinct from visits to heaven, which are common enough, and will be spoken of in their place), but it is the dead who visit him. And, lastly, I have not known the natives to be commonly fearful of dead bodies or of burial-places, or to associate these in any particular way with their dreams.

(I hope it will be most definitely noted that I am writing only of my own experiences, and of my experiences among the fairly civilized Basuto. I say nothing in prejudice of other and better observers, or of other tribes.)

The kind of dream that I came much across is well illustrated by the following story. Up among the mountains, behind one of my remoter stations, is a steep valley; and up this valley, at the end of everything, is a village. I had never been there, and am still not aware that anyone from there had ever been to see me. Late one afternoon, then, a man came from this village to call me to a 'sick' woman of whom, as we went, he related these facts. A month previously (or thereabouts) the women's heathen husband died. A week later (or thereabouts) she awoke one night screaming, and had said that as she lay asleep she had felt a hand on her shoulder. Awakening - such was her language, but of course she spoke of her dream - she saw her dead husband, in his ordinary clothes and so 'real' that she forgot for the moment that he was dead. She gave a cry of joy, and demanded where he had been to return to the hut so late. On that he had said: 'Send at once for the priest and be washed from your sins.' 'But why do you come now to tell me that?' she asked. 'Lest you die as I have done, unwashed,' he replied awefully. And at that she remembered his death, was convulsed with terror, and found herself awake.

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Her folk had temporized with her, and had not sent for me, none of them being Christian there; but ten days or so later she had dreamed again. This time her husband was angry, had said nothing, had not indeed needed to say anything, for she had known instinctively his anger and the reason for it. From that time she had eaten next to nothing, and had been in a kind of fit

all day long, merely reiterating that I must be sent for. But the night before she had dreamed that a white priest came in, in a white vestment, and, laying hands on her, had healed her.

The sequel is soon told. I heard her moaning, like that of an animal in pain, some distance from the hut, and she took no notice of my entrance. When I could see no sign of ordinary sickness, I knelt and prayed, and in my prayer commanded her to be at peace, and laid my hand on her. Her moanings died down at once. They concluded soon after I had finished the prayer. She sat awhile not speaking, but then arose and gave me food. From that day she entered on her instruction, and was baptized last year; and she has brought with her a dozen or more from that village.

In another case, a teacher of an outstation died during the influenza and at a long distance from home. His village learned of his death. Some days later his wife awoke in the night, ca. 'ed her son, and sent him to the door to listen for horse-hoofs. He could hear none. "Then,' said she, 'it will be tomorrow. The father will arrive. My husband has just told me to listen for horse-hoofs, for the priest is coming. And that I must not worry, but trust him, and he will do all that is right.' Now I had been intending to visit the village that day, but I had decided later to go the day after. No one there could possibly have known either intention.

Likewise the day following I was much delayed both in starting and on the road. I galloped up to the house late, expecting all would be in bed, and I was much surprised to find the boy awaiting me in my hut. 'Mother told me to wait for the father,' he said.

While I was there, the chief came to see me. After preliminaries, he said: "The father knows that for two years

I have "listened" to his voice, but I have not been converted. Also for two years I have watched (naming the teacher), and now last night he came to me and said I should not delay. Now, therefore, will my father write my name in his book?'

And lastly, amusingly and interestingly, I myself dreamed. With extraordinary vividness I thought I woke and saw this teacher, of whom I had been very fond, in my hut. I, also, did not realize at once that he was dead, and asked him what he wanted. 'Come outside,' he said. He took me out, under bright stars, and made a gesture to the wide semicircle of mountains. "You have to preach up and down all these,' he said. 'Why, yes, of course I shall, if I have time,' I said; 'but why do you wake me now to say so?' So saying I looked at him, and knew him dead. Also it seemed to me that he was dirty as with earth. And as I recoiled with the horror of the realization, he said sadly, and with an expression curiously unlike a nightmare: 'Yes, I am still dirty. Pray for me.'

I give all these three dreams because here is a mass of matter for the theorists. We are all absorbed in the affairs and matter of the dead teacher. I colored my dream with my beliefs, and the chief his with his already half-formed intentions. I may have been in mental telephony with the wife. One and all, we were over-superstitious. Doubtless it was so; I am well content to believe it. God fulfills Himself in many ways.

Dreams that do not involve dead friends are even more common in my experience. There is hardly a native who has not had several. The instances that have come my way are nearly all connected with religion, as is natural, and they well illustrate the native psychology. Few of them contain elements that cannot be explained, but none of them are without interest.

The first dream of this nature that I shall tell has indeed a peculiar conclusion. The heathen wife of a Christian husband, who had steadily resisted baptism, dreamed for four nights running as follows: (1) that she was lost on the veld in terror, and running over rough ground on which she finally stumbled and woke; (2) that she was again on the veld, but running toward a light in the sky ere she fell and woke; (3) that he was again running, but that the light was clearer and in the shape of a cross; (4) that she reached a deep kloof and saw on the other side, beneath a luminous cross, the figure of a woman, clothed in white, holding up and out a child. The kloof was full of worshiping people on their knees, through whom she could not make her way, and in the course of a frenzied attempt she awoke. The moment I entered the hut the next morning, an arresting thing took place. She literally threw herself out of bed and upon her knees, but at my side rather than before me, her hands clasped as if holding the feet of someone next but needless to say unseen by me. She exclaimed again and again: 'Ahe, Mofumahali!' ('Oh, Queen! Oh, Queen!'), and, when lifted up by her husband, said repeatedly: "The woman has come in with the priest!' She was apparently very ill, with a temperature of 105°, and I baptized her at once. She has made a resolute convert. When under instruction and normal, she was entirely ignorant of the Incarnation, for I examined her particularly to that end. She said, also, that she had never been inside a Roman Catholic Church, and we had no such figure at that time in our own. Nor could I discover that she had ever seen any such picture. It would not have struck her that these points were of any interest, so that I doubt much if she would consciously have lied; but of course she may have

heard of such things, even although she had normally forgotten them.

A complicated story concerns another man and another catechist of mine. The catechist was summoned to a distant village by a man who had been ill, had 'died,' and had returned to life. The man said that having died, he found himself on an unknown road which he traversed for sometime. Presently the road divided, and he hesitated which branch to take. While he hesitated a native came up to him, took him by the arm, and led him along one branch. As he went, our friend became increasingly struck with his guide's villainous countenance, and finally demanded whither they went. 'Never you mind,' sinisterly replied the guide; 'come on.' At that the 'dead' man became terrified, and cried for help, and on his crying, a third person came running across the lands. He was observed to have a cross marked on his brow, and at the sight of him the guide fled. The newcomer was much out of breath, explained that that road was the road to hell, and besought our friend to turn back and send for a teacher. He did so, reached the place in which he had first found himself, returned to life, and sent for the catechist.

Now the catechist was in a bit of a quandary. He had instructions not to baptize except in extremis and he did. not himself think that the man was very sick. So he signed him a catechumen, which service involves making a cross on the brow, and returned. The man promptly lay down contentedly enough, and that night 'died' again. His friends went so far as to make his coffin and dig his grave, and they sent for the catechist to bury him. Imagine, then, my teacher's astonishment to find on his return that the fellow had again come to life, and was withal most reproachful! His own story now was that he had again reached the cross

roads, and jubilantly taken the other turning. But in a while he met the third man, who looked at him, shook his head, and observed that he had no business there. 'Why?' demanded the other; 'I went back and I was signed.' "There is no cross on your brow,' said the man, ‘and unless you bear a cross you cannot come this way. Come and see.'

So he led him to a clear stream and they looked in. Sure enough, our friend's forehead was unmarked. Very angry and much hurt, he demanded an explanation, and was told that only the cross of baptism endured permanently, and that he had only had the outward sign of a catechumen signed upon him. At that, without a word, although the other stood and shouted at him, he ran back, returned to life, and now, reproachful at what he considered was a trick that had been played upon him, demanded baptism. My catechist thereupon gave it up and baptized him, and in less than an hour he was again 'dead.' Still much perplexed, the catechist gave him twentyfour hours for a reappearance, and then buried him; and buried he is to this day. In all the story, for which I can definitely vouch, as I examined all the witnesses (and the grave), that is about all that will not admit of two explanations.

The point of interest really lies in this, that in his subconscious state the man certainly had access to information not known to his normal state. He honestly did not know enough of Christianity to distinguish between baptism and the signing of a catechumen, which is not wonderful, for the catechumens all consider themselves Christians, and I have known even catechists so poorly taught that they did not consider the baptism of a catechumen in extremis at all a vital matter. A natural explanation must

presume, I suppose, that the man had somewhere, at some previous time, heard the matter fully explained; that while unconscious his subliminal self was troubled about it, and troubled twice; and that this subliminal uneasiness delayed his fleeing spirit. But my catechist does not know of the subliminal. He was chiefly worried over the identity of the other men in the story, and at what had been shouted at the dead man and not by him reported.

The experience of the prophet I have mentioned presents many points of interest. He was undoubtedly a heathen, of no education whatever, and of some thirty years of age, when all that I shall tell befell him. He lived in a village far removed from Europeans, and in a little-civilized district. He fell ill, and he 'died.' It was winter, and therefore probably he was 'dead' for some three days, for he recovered only when the grave was dug, the coffin made, the food prepared, and the mourners gathered. He sat up suddenly while the old women were discoursing upon him; and thus, so to speak, enjoyed the experience of hearing his own obituary notices. He told the old folk entirely what he thought of them, where he had been and what he had seen, and they were his first converts.

It seemed to him that he had been dead many years, and the full recital of those years would take much time. He had, for example, come to a river and observed that it was both too full and too deep to cross. On the bank were gathered many souls, and now and again unearthly spirits crossed the river easily, selected one and another, and as easily led them over. Then the prophet (to anticipate) mingled with the crowd, and asked why it was that one and another were selected. Could he not cross? The people one and all glanced at his knees, and told him that

not until they were hard from kneeling did he stand any chance of crossing. And thus does the prophet to-day inculcate the duty of prayer.

Once across, after long learning of prayers, he came to God's throne, and was there ordered to return to earth and make up for lost time by preaching repentance. Like another Isaiah, he confessed that he could not speak; not so much, however, because his lips were unclean, but because he was unlearned; and therefore God ordered him to be taught to read. This, therefore, constituted one miraculous sign of his office, for having never learned he now could read. In the hut, on awakening, he immediately demanded a book; and there was none in the village. In a day or two one was procured from the Mission, and at once he opened it and began to read. Such is the universal testimony. Further, he now knew many prayers. Also he had a gift of interpretations. And I was assured by his chaplain that he had performed miracles of healing. The chief miracle that I saw was that he made no sect, as I have said. Called by chief after chief to his village, this unbaptized man converted numbers and drew no reward other than that he lived on hospitality. I thought I detected that his secretary would have liked a contribution, but I am not sure. Certainly the man himself struck me as being extremely simple and straightforward. The confusion of our sects bewildered him, and for that reason he was not willing to join any. The French Protestants did, however, ultimately baptize him; and to this he consented because they give him the readiest welcome. A Church of England minister or two had also invited him to preach in church. I think he was disappointed that I did not.

Here, then, was a conversion pretty nearly as complete and sudden as that of Saul the Pharisee; but I did not meet

him until a year or more after it occurred, and upon only one point could I really lay hold. I tackled the reading 'miracle,' and the interesting thing was that undoubtedly he could not read much even then. So far as I could discover he could 'read' anywhere in the Gospels, the commoner Epistles, and some of the Psalms with ease and fluency. Given a place, he would glance at it and then begin. If you stopped him however, he knew at what point in the print he had been arrested. In the Old Testament, with the exception of such passages as Genesis 1 or Isaiah LI, he went much more slowly. He stumbled hopelessly among the genealogies of Chronicles like a child beginning to read.

This is then, as likely as not, an amazing case of the subliminal memory. As a boy or as a young man, in village after village, he may have been within earshot of the reading of the Scriptures; for converts, who can do so, will sit on the ground and read aloud for hours, and the services of the French Protestant catechists consist largely of such readings. It must be supposed, then, that the whole of these had been stored by him subconsciously, and were now, by a strange circumstance, placed at his normal disposal. Since then he had learned syllables and letters. But he still could not read. He said himself that he could only 'read' the Bible.

A final illustration I will give, upon which I confess my inability to comment in the very least. I was on trek in the heart of the Drakensberg, and by chance called for twenty-four hours at a village which I had never visited before, and, as a matter of fact, have never visited since. Toward the afternoon of the day that I was there, a native rode into the village, on a deadbeat horse, inquiring for the white priest. On his being brought to me, he exclaimed: "Thou art the man, my