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I WAS born at Kerrumore in Glenlyon, where
my
father was a farmer, on the morning of the ninth of
February, 1828, when a snowstorm was raging so
fiercely that Dr Macarthur and my uncle Archibald,
who had been sent for him, had, with their horses,
some difficulty in crossing Larig-an-Lochain from
Killin. My memory of local occurrences and of
self-mental impressions becomes continuous and
tenacious at five years of age, when I could read
the Gospel narrative fluently in English, which to
us Glen children was much like a foreign language,
and more haltingly in the Gaelic vernacular because
of its system of spelling and the many dead letters
thereby entailed. At six I could pass, after sunset
and in the darkness of night, St Bran's old church-yard near our house, without, as I often did before,
using the Lord's Prayer or bits of psalms and
hymns as a protection against ghosts. I had
also long before this ceased to speculate on the
possibility of reaching a hand to the stars when
they seemed to crowd down on the sharp ridge
of the opposite hill and to hide themselves
behind it. Having been once taken up the side-glen to the shealings and allowed to remain
there for some time, I widened my knowledge and
got rid of much infantile awe of the wonders of my
expanding world, by wandering away to a mountain
top from which I had a wide view, and where I
found the sky was as far above my head as it was
down on the banks of the Lyon. Out of the dim
mists of childish recollection an event which took
place when I was about three years of age flashes
out in vivid light. At Moar farm house some miles
further up the glen, died, at an advanced age, my
grandmother's aunt. The farm house was on one
side of the river and the highroad on the other.
It was intended to take the coffin across the river
to the highroad, and so to get to the Bridge of
Balgie, which was then the only bridge on the
thirty miles course of the Lyon, and was quite near
to the church-yard. But this could not be done as
the river was in flood and a great storm was still
raging. So the funeral had to come by a rough and
scarcely perceptible footpath, through one of the
best marked self-sown remnants of the primitive
Caledonian forest that still remain. My grand-mother and I were on a bench at the end of the
house waiting for it we were generally a league of
two against the world and when the funeral came
in sight a flash of lightning seemed to dance on the
wet mort-cloth and to envelope the whole procession.
The thunder peal which followed caused the echoes
of the many rocks and hills to reverberate like
the firing-off of a succession of big gun batteries.
No doubt it was the lightning and thunder which
permanently stamped the memory of this funeral
on my mind.
As late as about 1780, a Glenlyon woman,
Elgin
Menzies, wife of Duncan Macnaughton, Cashlie,
who died with her infant in childbed, Avas supposed
to have been taken away by the fairies, and the
story ran that she had been seen in dreams and
heard to moan in hope of rescue from the three fairy
mounds Tom-a-churain, Tom-a-chorain, and Tom-na-glaice-moire, among which she was shifted about
and kept imprisoned. But before my birth, religious
teaching had banished the poor fairies from their
mounds, although many stories concerning them and
mountain hags, kelpies and brownies, were still told
round firesides and smearing tubs. Witchcraft was
not much spoken of, nor much thought of, although
it had not been so outrightly denounced from the
pulpit as the fairies. Belief in ghosts was very
general, and deemed, from the religious point of
view, as orthodox as belief in good and evil spirits,
and their intervention in human affairs. Nature
with manifold mystic influences keeps her hold on
the rural population everywhere, but this hold is
particularly strong in mountain lands, lonely isles,
and countries which have wide deserts. Nature
and God himself can be disregarded by urban masses
of people; but it is otherwise in rural districts. Even
on the plains of East Anglia and the flats of Holland,
people are influenced by forces and sensations which
cannot be accounted for by visible and material
causes. Whatever be the reason, Highlanders are
deeply laid under this spell of nature influences and
scenery environment. This fact is apparent enough
in their poetry and traditional stories. It takes a
pathetic form in their undying love for the place
where they were born, or where in former days their
ancestors lived, which is cherished by emigrants in
the colonies and foreign lands, and by their children
and children's children for "Caledonia stern and
wild." But it is just in the stern and wild countries
in which man, through contact and combat with
nature in her various moods, lets his imagination fly
on wings of poetry and romance, and is inspired by
a patriotism that does not take a worldly account
of the material advantages enjoyed by the inhabitants of more fertile if more prosaic lands.
To revert to this Highland belief in
ghosts in the
days of my youth, it is to be noted that although it
was orthodox and very general, it was by no means
universal. The sceptics were very numerous. I was
one of them myself when I came to anything like
years of discretion. The childish fear which made
me resort for protection against danger when passing
the churchyard alone after sunset, or in the night,
was largely due to two things which deeply impressed me. The scare caused by the Burke and
Hare case sent such an after-fear into the Highlands
that, among others, our churchyard was watched
for weeks after every funeral because of the body-snatchers. The key of the churchyard was always
kept in our house, and the watcher, with loaded
gun, used to come for it. So I heard many resurrectionist stories which frightened me much worse
than the usual run of ghost stories. The other
frightening thing was the burial outside the church-yard of a poor woman of very good character, who,
in middle-age melancholic madness, had hanged herself to a beam behind the barred door of her cottage.
The Glen people followed Niven, or Macniven, their
priest, who joined the Knoxian Reformation at its early stage, and took to
himself a wife. Since 1688 they had been, with few exceptions, staunch
Presbyterians, and when this poor woman committed suicide, they had ultra-
Protestant religious views. Yet when startled by this most unusual event of
a suicide, they agreed, in council hastily assembled, to fall back upon the
traditional Roman Catholic practice of burial of suicides by night outside
consecrated ground. This was the chief but not the
only thing in which they unconsciously retained
remnants of the superseded faith. In speaking of
dead people they generally added, "Math gu 'n robh
aige." "Sith gu 'n d' fhuair anam," that is to say,
they prayed that all should be well with the dead
man, and that his soul should have peace.
When twelve or thirteen years of age, I
passed,
one wintry night, through an experience which
much increased my want of belief in the general
rank and file of ghost stories. On that night when
I went to bed, my grandmother seemed to be in her
usual state of health, which was a good one for a
person of her advanced years. I was roused out of
sleep some hours later by my father, who came to
my bedside with a lighted candle in hand, to tell
me that my grandmother had been seized with a
bleeding of the nose, which the means commonly
used in such cases failed to stop. He bade me rise
at once to go for her married daughters, who lived a
mile away. I had to pass the churchyard, and was
full of death-apprehension. The moon was shining
dimly through a hoar-frost haze. In passing the
churchyard gate I had no thought of ghosts, but I
shuddered at the idea that it was only too likely
my grandmother would have to be buried in
kindred dust in that dreadfully cold weather. The
cold added to my horror, although it could not be
anything to the dead. I had not gone out of sight
of the churchyard before I thought I was haunted
by the ghostly head of an old woman which was not
attached to any appearance of body. The horrid
thing kept quite close to the right side of my face,
always holding the same position whether I ran,
turned, or stopped. The cold sweat of fear broke
out on me from head to foot. In sheer desperation
I put up my hand, and lo! I caught my ghost. The
ribbon of my Glengarry bonnet had happened to get
pinched forward behind my ear, and the indented
end of it, covered by my breath, had frozen white,
and seen close at hand from the tail of one eye, had
assumed the appearance of this ghostly head of an
old woman with a weird gap between a big nose
and a prominent chin.
Many years after I had caught this ghost
of
mine, I gathered a large batch of stories of the
supernatural then current in the Highlands of
Perthshire, and found, when they were classified,
that most of them were stories of wraiths and
second sight, and the few which purported to
concern returned spirits of the dead were not nearly
so well vouched for as the others. There was one
Balquidder story which did not seem to belong to
either class. It made much local stir in its day,
and the unexplainable manifestations were, I was
told, witnessed in open daylight by many astonished
observers, who gathered from various parts of the
district to see articles of furniture thrown about
without any visible agency, potatoes thrown out
of a creel at the burnside without hands, rhyme,
or reason, thatch from the roof tossed off' without a
breath of wind, and other singular performances
which could only be ascribed to a tricksy Puck,
full of mischievous fun spiced with a generous dose
of malice. "Riochdan," or wraiths, which meant visible semblances of
living persons where their bodies were not, had some similarity to Marconi's
wireless telegraphy, but went a long step beyond it. The theory was that
when a person strongly wished to be in another place he could throw a
visible semblance of himself there. Concentration of a strong will under the
impulse of an overmastering desire was required to effect the miracle of projection. Such a wonder-working concentration of
will was held to be uncanny, and unholy even when
the impulse under which it took place was blameless
or even genuinely good. So double-gangers were
held in some suspicion. But the second-sight people
saw the wraiths of people who had no wish what-
ever to be elsewhere than where they were, and
who had not the faintest sub-conscious idea that
their semblances were stravaging.
This leads me to speak of Mairi Mhor, who
had
been for nearly all her life a fixture in our house,
and who was the last of the Glenlyon second-sighters.
A very sorrowful lad of eleven or twelve I was on
the stormy wintry day on which Mairi's head was
laid in the grave. The custom was that clansmen
should have the first and last "togail," or lifting of
the dead, and that the coffin should be brought
"sunwise" up to the grave. At Mairi's funeral my
father held the coffin's head-string as chief mourner
and I held the foot one, while four of our clansmen
had the first and last liftings. When the strings
were thrown in on the coffin and the first spadefuls
of mould fell on it, making a hollow sound, I should
have liked to have a good cry. But as I thought
crying unmanly, I restrained, with an effort, the
choking sensation in my throat. Hundreds of times
had I made Mairi sing the milking song of "Crodh
Chailein," "Macgregor from Roro," and other
favourite pieces of Gaelic poetry, some of which
survive in printed books, and some of which have
undeservedly perished because not collected in due
time. The musical gift, which Mairi most liberally
possessed, was not bestowed upon me, but for all
that I was ardently fond of Gaelic poetry and tales
of ancient days. It was my great-grandfather who
brought Mairi into our family. A niece of his who
was married to a distant kinsman died, leaving four
or five young children. The bereaved father of these
children was then in much worse circumstances than
he was later on when he went down to Callander
and married, for his second wife, a Stewart lass from
Glenbuckie. In a way common in the Highlands
the kinsfolk came to the poor widower's aid and
relieved him of some of his children. My great-grandfather took Mairi, then seven years old, to our
house, and there she remained until she died more
than fifty years afterwards. She had her first vision
in the hill near a reputed fairy mound, and she
always thought it was a vision of the fairies,
although the shapes she saw were of grey-clothed
men and not of green-robed beautiful little ladies.
She was willing enough to be persuaded that she
had on that occasion slept and dreamed, for she
looked on second-sight as a frightful affliction which
she was afraid of having inherited from her grand-father, Iain Dubh, the Laird of Culdare's caretaker
of woods and castle-lands. My great-grandfather,
who was this Dark John's elder brother, besides
being a farmer, was the "Maor," or land-steward.
So was his father, Finlay, before him, and so was
my grandfather in succession to him, until long after
the division of the barony. I do not know how long
the maorship had passed from father to son, but I
believe the passing was continuous for at least two
centuries, although ownership had in that period
twice changed. The Finlay above mentioned and
his cousin, Finlay Macnaughton, were soldiers for a
period of years during the reign of Queen Anne, and
when in garrison at Fort-William, they became
acquainted with twin sisters, Anne and Janet,
daughters of Dark John Maciver, in the Braes of
Lochaber, whom they afterwards married. Dark
John Campbell was named after his Lochaber grand-father, and perhaps it was from that quarter his seership came to him. He was the only one of his
father's family who had that troublesome gift. Dark
John knew all the secrets of his cunning laird, James
Menzies of Culdares, and guarded them with grim
fidelity. Culdares was out in 1715, and he arid his
Glenlyon followers were captured at Preston. His
men were sent as seven years' bondsmen to Maryland,
but by virtue of powerful influence and looks which
were much more youthful than his years, he himself
got off with a short exile on the Continent, whence
he returned to the Highlands with larch plants in his
valise the first ever seen or planted in this country.
As an estate improver, planter of trees, and promoter
of good farming, high credit is due to James Menzies,
who, after his son and heir grew up, came to be
commonly called Old Culdares. He and his hench-
man, Dark John, remained at home during the
rebellion of 1745. But he sent a gift horse to
Prince Charlie by John Macnaughton, who was
afterwards tried and executed at Carlisle for killing
Colonel Gardiner, when he was lying wounded at
Prestonpans. The report of the trial does not
support the popular surmise that John Macnaughton
could have saved his life by informing against the
sender of the gift-horse. But no doubt Old Culdares
had a bad time of it while the case was pending.
He was too artful to commit any act of overt rebellion after his narrow escape thirty years before.
But he was quite content that Cluny and his men
should force out the men on his estate, as they had
forced out Sir Robert Menzies' men down the water.
The Glenlyon men refused to rise unless their laird
put himself at their head. The laird declined to
lead them, but he used underhand methods to get
them to follow a youth of eighteen, Archibald,
youngest son of John Campbell, styled of Glenlyon,
who did not, at this time, possess a foot of land in
Glenlyon, although he owned Fortingall. With this
youth was joined an older man, Duncan Campbell,
son of Duneaves, who then had the farm of Milton-Eonan on Culdares' estate. But it was to the youth
and the old rebel, his father, that the men of the
Glen looked as their "duchas," or natural hereditary
leaders. Those among the men of the Glen who
did not sympathise with the rebellion joined Lord
Glenorchy's regiment on the other side.
Old Culdares anticipated the Disarming
Act, on
hearing of the Culloden defeat, by at once causing
all the fire-arms of his men to be gathered and
secretly buried in a place near Meggernie Castle, so
that they might be available in case of another
rising, for which, probably, he never ceased to hope
till the day of his death in 1775. There is now
plenty of evidence to prove that he was engaged in
Jacobite plottings after the death of the Old Pretender. Pending a Stuart Restoration he did not,
however, fail to avail himself of interim chances.
He managed to get his heir, Archibald, appointed
Commissioner of Customs in Edinburgh, and to
obtain for his younger son John a commission in the
army of King George. While a perfect double-dealer in his relations with the
established Government, he was, to his honour, as true as steel to the
disinherited dynasty and all members of the Jacobite
party. In the summer of 1746 it was pretty well
known in Glenlyon by persons who were used as
scouts to guard against surprise, that an important
fugitive from Culloden was lurking about the dens
and gullies of Gallin Burn, which has cut a deep
ravine down the face of Gallin Hill, but it was only
known to Dark John and his master who that
important fugitive was, and they took precious care
to keep their secret to themselves. Great care was
needed, for King George's soldiers had stations at
Weem, Fortingall, and the head of Loch Lyon,
whence they were constantly patrolling up and
down, and often visiting Meggernie Castle, where
Old Culdares, as a matter of policy, received them
with a show of loyal welcome and Highland hospitality. It was noted that he had arranged a system
of signals by showing lights from turret windows,
which would tell Dark John when it was safe for the
fugitive to come down to sleep in his cottage, and
when he should tell him to keep away. One night
in haymaking time, matters must have been thought
very critical, for Dark John went down to Innerwick, and without further explanation than the vain
allegation of his being afraid of ghosts, forced an
ex-rebel to walk up with him to Gallin. But when
they got near Dark John's cottage what sounded
like the cry of an unknown bird was heard, and the
rebel, Iain Dubh Chuilfhodair, who lived to be
nearly a hundred, and happened to be my mother's
grandfather, was kept from entering the cottage,
and curtly told to go home. The seer traded on
his uncanny repute at this time to put his cottage
under taboo, and used his caretaker's authority to
the utmost for keeping prying eyes away from the
hill lurking-place of the fugitive. But who could
this important fugitive have been? I can only hint
at a probable answer by asking another question,
Where did Lord George Murray conceal himself in
the long interval between the disbanding of the Jacobite forces assembled at Ruthven and the visit
to his wife at Tullibardine?
Although Dark John could use the awe with
which his uncanny gift inspired other people for
protecting a fugitive from Culloden, and perhaps
other purposes, he always lamented his possession of
that gift. No wonder, when his unbidden visions
were usually forecasts of the deaths of persons
whose deaths were then to be least expected. Old
Culdares, to whom John had been grimly faithful
for upwards of forty years, died in 1775. To his
son and successor, the Commissioner, John had been
devotedly attached from that fine fellow's cradle
days. When the Commissioner and his recently
married wife came to Meggernie to take possession,
John was jubilant, although somewhat weak and
shaken by a late illness. When at his departing
for Edinburgh, the Commissioner shook hands with
him and said he hoped to find him in better health
when he came back again, John shook from head to
foot, and wailed out the words, "We will never meet
again." The Commissioner drove off, believing that
John expected no recovery for himself. But no
sooner was the carriage out of sight than John,
amid sobs and tears, blurted out the explanation,
"I may live for years, but his days are numbered.
When he shook hands with me I saw the shroud
drawn up to his very throat." He immediately
repented of having spoken out, and as he could not
recall his words, implored those who heard them to
keep silent about what he had said till the bad
news came, which in a short time was sure to come
from Edinburgh. The silence was kept but badly, for
all the people of the Glen were aware of what John
had said before the news came of the death of the
Commissioner, who shortly after his return to Edinburgh was seized by a malignant fever, to which he
quickly succumbed in the summer of his years and
the fulness of his strength. Dark John survived
his beloved master for some years, but was never
his old self again. The prophecy of the Commissioner's death, of which the Commissioner himself
had no knowledge or suspicion, was much talked
about at gatherings of gentry in Edinburgh, as well
as by people in Glenlyon and the neighbouring
districts of the Highlands. The gift or affliction of
second-sight did not descend to any of his three
children. His son, the schoolmaster of Ardeonaig,
lived, worked, and died as, in his sphere, a man of
light, reading, and piety, on the south side of Loch
Tay. His two daughters, who married in Glenlyon,
were quite as normal as their neighbours, and so
were their children, with the solitary exception of
Mairi Mhor.
Mairi and her grandfather would probably
have
been remarkable mediums had they happened to
live in this age. Their visions came upon them like
unwelcome surprises, but if they had willed them
instead of willing against them, the case might have
been different. Mairi Mhor had not, like Dark John, gruesome visions of
shrouds on living persons. Her warnings of deaths came by seeing, in open
day, wraiths of persons who were not to die. but to come for the churchyard
key, or to officiate prominently at other people's funerals. She more than
once mistook the appearances for the real persons,
and under that idea revealed what she would other-
wise try to suppress, because my father disliked as
much to hear about her abnormal visitations as
she disliked to endure them herself. Mairi was an industrious, humbly pious,
thoroughly good woman, who recoiled with horror from her uncanny gift of
seeing what was invisible to others. The strangest of all Main's glimpses of
the future was her vision of the mill-stone, the announcement of which I
heard, and the fulfilment of which I witnessed myself. I remember very
distinctly both the announcement and the fulfilment, but being then only seven
or eight years old, I rely upon the report of my
seniors for the fuller form of this story as accepted
by the people of the Glen.
I think it must have been the time of
peat-cutting, when, after an early breakfast, masters and
servants went off to their work up the hill, taking
with them bottles of milk and oatcakes for their
midday meal, and coming home before nightfall to a
supper of broth, meat, and potatoes. Such a meal
was in preparation when the smoke of the kitchen
sent Mairi, who was asthmatic, to take refuge on
the bench at the end of the house, where she
stopped till the peat-cutters were sitting down to
their food, by evening daylight. Then Mairi rushed
in with blazing eyes, and, under strong excitement,
told her wonder tale before my father could suppress
her. As Mairi's visions were generally forecasts of funerals, he was always
anxious to suppress the revelation of them, not so much from the unbelief in
them which he pretended to hold, as because of the effect they would have on
his wife, servants, and children. On this occasion her vision was such a
wonder to herself that she refused to be suppressed. She said she had seen a
great gathering of the men of the neighbourhood, pulling by ropes tied to a
pole which was stuck through a hole in its middle, a big round thing which
they made to roll along over the burn and on past the hillock near the burn.
Then my father took her in hand and accused her of falling asleep and
dreaming. It was an argument he often used to silence her, and which she
knew had some foundation of fact, since it was undeniable that when busy at
work, carding or spinning wool, she occasionally dropped off into dream
trances. But this time she was sure she was wide awake when the wonder thing
passed, and she ended by saying to my father "I saw you there among the
rest." A short time passed, and as nothing happened, the dream theory appeared to be justified.
But lo ! one hot day the miller, in a huge hurry, and
with his coat over his shoulder, came to tell the
farmers who had much grain waiting to be ground
for the next four months' provision, that the upper
mill-stone had splintered that morning, and that
the mill would, of course, have to stand idle until
the broken stone was replaced by a new one. When Mairi heard of the accident, and listened to a talk
about the methods to be used in bringing a new one
to the mill, she said at once, "That is what I saw."
But at first it looked as if her vision would prove
false to a large degree, for it was up the Glen that a
rock was chosen out of which to carve the mill-
stone. When some cutting out had been done, a
flaw was discovered, and that place was abandoned.
Down the Glen, on the Ben Lawers hills, the next cutting out took place, and
a good mill-stone was the result, which, with a hole in its middle and
roughly dressed, had then to be taken down from its high position and
piloted and dragged up to the mill. Through the hole made in the middle of
it for suiting its permanent mill work, a young larch tree, stripped and
rounded, was driven and used as a rudder, lever, and holdfast for the ropes
by which the men pulled it on and kept it back when a drag was required.
They thus managed to take it down from a rough and high mountain, and by a
convenient ford to get it across the river to the high
road which they intended to follow to Balgie Bridge,
or a ford opposite Milton if the bridge did not give
scope for the free working of their long pole. Had
this intention been carried out, the procession would
not have passed where Mairi had seen the wraith
form. But at a narrow and dangerous turn of the
road, within sight of Balgie Bridge, they found
they could not get past. So they had to turn back
to the ford below the manse, and having crossed
there, they had no option but to follow the route of
Mairi's vision, since the level fields were barred to
them by the rising crops. The vision, therefore,
was literally fulfilled without accident or mishap to
men or mill-stone.
As already said, I met with comparatively
few
stories about the spirits of the dead returning to
trouble the living, in the Perthshire Highlands, and
of those few scarcely any was so well vouched for
as most of the wraith and second-sight stories.
Although in Queen Anne's reign Meggernie Castle
won the repute of being haunted, until a bold
schoolmaster, with Bible and pistol, undertook to
lay the troubled spirit with his mail-armour and
clanking chains and did it the Glenlyon dead
gave so little trouble to the living that there was no
other story about them in my early days. But in
those early days of mine, what was called "Spiorad
na Comhsheilg," caused commotion in Breadalbane,
and was much talked about in our Glen and in other
neighbouring districts. The story was told before
the Killin Kirk-Session, and the session clerk scrolled
in writing the complaint of the Spiorad's family,
and the tale in defence told by the man who said
he saw the ghost and got from it a message to
deliver to its family. I found afterwards that the
complaint and the defence were not, although
written down, entered in the Kirk-Session minute-
book, and was told that the matter had been as far
as possible hushed up later on, and that threatened
proceedings in the civil court for slandering the
dead had been given up because the Spiorad sent
through the medium a further message to the family
which convinced them, by certain revelation of
secrets, that it was wiser to let proceedings drop
and do what the Spiorad desired. As far as I can
recollect, the following was the story, which I found
many years afterwards still in semi-whispered circulation.
Donald Donn, a farmer in good
circumstances and of honest reputation, was lying ill when the heir and
widow of another farmer, with whom he had cross-transactions in former
years, claimed payment for a mare Donald had bought from the dead man, and
which they, the dead man's representatives, said in the settling of accounts
had not been paid for. Donald, on the other hand, declared that the animal
had been paid for, and so did his wife in far more decisive words than he
used. It seemed indeed at the last that he relied on his wife's certainty of
conviction, and not on his own failing memory. As he was clearly drawing
very near his end, the claimants said they would let the question be settled
by his oath of verity. So a neighbouring Justice of the Peace was called in,
and Donald swore in presence of the claimants that the mare had been paid
for. In taking the oath, he was so weak that his
wife had to help him to hold up his hand. Within
twenty-four hours Donald was dead, and, to use the
phrase regarding people of blameless records, "was
honourably buried before God and man." Time
passed, and the dispute faded away from public
memory, till the report spread that Donald's spirit
had come back to redress the mistake he had made
regarding the matter of the mare. A weaver, who
had a house and a small croft in an upland glade of
a wood near Donald's farm, when coming home
through the wood from the Killin clachan one night
was met by a dog, which, on being threatened with
an iron-shod staff, changed into a foal, and then into
the form of Donald Donn. In its final shape the
spirit fought with the weaver, who found that, while
he was grasping what seemed to be only an air-
blown bladder, he received electric shocks or, as he
phrased it, shocks from "cuibhle nan goimheanan,"
or the electric wheel, which was then in repute for
curing rheumatic pains and mitigating creeping
paralysis. The weaver, despairing of his life, at last
cried out, "Donald, why are you so hard with me?"
"Why," said the spirit, letting the man go, "did
you not speak to me before?" Then they entered
into pacific conversation, and the spirit explained
that he was suffering much from the oath he had
taken, when memory and mind were failing him, in
regard to the claim about the mare, and that he
wanted his family to settle this claim. To shew
how much he suffered he opened his long cloak, and
his bare body looked like a glass case filled with
liquid flame. He gave the weaver some tokens to
convince his family that the message sent to them
was genuinely from himself. The tokens were in-
sufficient. The wife and children of the dead man
were not convinced, but so highly indignant that
they hauled the weaver before the Session and
threatened to bring him before the Sheriff or Court
of Session. Before the Session the weaver told his
story as he had told it to the family, and unflinchingly maintained that it was the truth and nothing
but the truth. But for all his assertions he would
have been in serious trouble if the spirit, at a second
interview, had not furnished him with further
credentials which silenced the dead man's family,
and made them anxious to hush the matter up. The
hushing up was so well done that the general public
never learned whether or not the claim about the
mare had been satisfied, but the belief of the country
was that it had been quietly settled under a promise
to say nothing about it. At the second interview
the weaver asked the spirit if he could tell when he,
the weaver, would die? The spirit answered that
he could only tell him that when he was at the
funeral of a man who lived down the Lochside his
own funeral would be the next one to the clachan
church-yard. The man designated was in good
health and much younger than the weaver. The
latter determined to take good care to keep away
from this man's funeral if he chanced unexpectedly
to die before him. Neither kinship nor close personal
friendship would make his presence obligatory. But,
as usually happened in such cases of forewarning,
his "dan," or weird, was too strong for him. News
in stormy, wintry weather did not then travel fast,
and the weaver's croft and cottage were in a lonely
nook off the road. Business one day made it necessary for him to go to the clachan. As he came to
the junction of his side-glen road with the lochside
main road, a funeral overtook him, which, as it was
going the same way as himself, he could not help
joining. On asking whose funeral it was, he found
it was that of the very man whose death was to be
the forecast of his own. He took the doom involved
very philosophically; went to the clachan, settled
his business there, visited a married daughter and
other friends there, calmly told them his story,
solemnly bade them farewell, walked back home,
took to bed and died within the week. So his
funeral came next to that of the other man. |
