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36
A BOOK OF FOLK-LORE
the man awoke and was asked about what he had dreamt, he said that he had been a long journey and in it he had twice crossed a bridge of steel.
Hugh Miller, in My Schools and Schoolmasters, when writing about a cousin named George, says:—
He communicated to me a tradition illustrative of the Celtic theory of dreaming, of which I have since often thought. Two young men had been spending the early portion of a warm summer day in exactly such a scene as that in which he communicated to me the anecdote. There was an ancient ruin beside them, separated, however, from the mossy bank on which they sat by a slender runnel, across which lay, immediately over a miniature cascade, a few withered grass-stalks. Overcome by the heat of the day, one of the young men fell asleep; his companion watched drowsily beside him, when all at once the watcher was aroused to attention by seeing a little, indistinct form, scarcely larger than a humble-bee, issue from the mouth of the sleeping man and, leaping upon the moss, move downwards to the runnel, which it crossed along the withered grass-stalks, and then disappeared amid the interstices of the ruin. Alarmed by what he saw, the watcher hastily shook his companion by the shoulder, and awoke him; though, with all his haste, the little cloud-like creature, still more rapid in its movements, issued from the interstice into which it had gone, and flying across the runnel, instead of creeping along the grass-stalks and over the sward, as before, it re-entered the mouth of the sleeper just as he was in the act of awakening. ‘What is the matter with you?’ said the watcher, greatly alarmed; ‘what ails you?’ ‘Nothing ails me,’ replied the other;
