He had borrowed it without my knowledge during our last sojourn in St.Louis; and I recognized instantly that my dream of several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, so far as these details went--and I think I missed one detail; but that one was immediately supplied, for just then an elderly lady entered the place with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the centre of it was a red rose, and she laid it on his breast.
I told the dream there in the Club that night just as I have told it here.
Rev.Dr.Burton swung his leonine head around, focussed me with his eye, and said: "When was it that this happened ?" "In June, '58." "It is a good many years ago.

Have you told it several times since ?" "Yes, I have, a good many times." "How many ?" "Why, I don't know how many." "Well, strike an average.

How many times a year do you think you have told it ?" "Well, I have told it as many as six times a year, possibly oftener." "Very well, then you've told it, we'll say, seventy or eighty times since it happened ?" "Yes," I said, "that's a conservative estimate." "Now then, Mark, a very extraordinary thing happened to me a great many years ago, and I used to tell it a number of times--a good many times--every year, for it was so wonderful that it always astonished the hearer, and that astonishment gave me a distinct pleasure every time.

I never suspected that that tale was acquiring any auxiliary advantages through repetition until one day after I had been telling it ten or fifteen years it struck me that either I was getting old, and slow in delivery, or that the tale was longer than it was when it was born.
Mark, I diligently and prayerfully examined that tale with this result: that I found that its proportions were now, as nearly as I could make oat, one part fact, straight fact, fact pure and undiluted, golden fact, and twenty-four parts embroidery.

I never told that tale afterwards--I was never able to tell it again, for I had lost confidence in it, and so the pleasure of telling it was gone, and gone permanently.