"Dear Giulia Grisi sang '_Sedut' al Pie d' un' Salice,' and that tune
has always been associated in my mind with your tongue ever since, and
always will be. Your dear mother used to play it on the harp. Do
you remember?
"Then came that extraordinary dream, which you remember as well as I do:
_wasn't_ it a wonder? You see, my dear father had learned a strange
secret of the brain--how in sleep to recall past things and people and
places as they had once been seen or known by him--even unremembered
things. He called it 'dreaming true,' and by long practice, he told me,
he had brought the art of doing this to perfection. It was the one
consolation of his troubled life to go over and over again in sleep all
his happy youth and childhood, and the few short years he had spent with
his beloved young wife. And before he died, when he saw I had become so
unhappy that life seemed to have no longer any possible hope of pleasure
for me, he taught me his very simple secret.
"Thus have I revisited in sleep every place I have ever lived in, and
especially this, the beloved spot where I first as a little girl
knew _you_!"
That night when we met again in our common dream I was looking at the
boys from Saindou's school going to their _premiere communion_, and
thinking very much of you, as I had seen you, when awake, a few hours
before, looking out of the window at the 'Tete Noire;' when you suddenly
appeared in great seeming trouble and walking like a tipsy man; and my
vision was disturbed by the shadow of a prison--alas! alas!--and two
little jailers jingling their keys and trying to hem you in.
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