A PSYCHOLOGICAL RIDDLE. [To TEE EDITOE or ma "Srsorsvoarj SIR,—You
are fond of analysing mental phenomena of all kinds, and amongst them I do not think you reject dreams as beneath your notice. Can you throw light on the probable mental con-
dition which could explain the following?
I lately dreamt that at an evening party a lady handed to me a manuscript book containing four charades in verse, and asked me to help her to find them out. I perused them all attentively, and the last I read so often and so carefully that I remembered it perfectly the next morning, and wrote it down. These were the lines,—
" Take thou a portion of the earth's fair form,
And deck it like a messenger of Heaven ; Thou shalt have shelter from the forest storm,
Where Peak's rude slopes to Derwent's vale are given."
In my dream I handed the book back to the lady in despair, and said that I had no clue to them, and was quite unable to help her.
She then called my attention to a note on the back of this fourth charade, and asked me if that would assist me. What the note was I could not afterwards recover, but it called to my re- membrance a well-known old manor-house in Derbyshire, and turning to the charade again, my idea that " Wingfield " was the answer was confirmed. The charade is indifferent enough.
Wingfield Manor House is scarcely on the sides of the Peak Mountains, nor exactly above the valley of the Derwent, but
Wingfield—, Wingedfield "would be more accurate—issufficiently good an answer to make it inexplicable to me how the verse was composed, before I had any knowledge of the intended solution.
Of this I am perfectly certain, that in my dream I had not the faintest conception of the answer till I had given up all hope of discovering it, and had handed the book back.—I am, Sir, &c.,
ONCE A DENIZEN OF DERBYSHIRE.
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