I know no place where one may be brought acquainted with the more credulous beliefs of our forefathers at a less expense of inquiry and exertion, than in a country lykewake. The house of mourning is naturally a place of sombre thoughts and ghostly a.s.sociations. There is something, too, in the very presence and appearance of death, that leads one to think of the place and state of the dead. Cowper has finely said, that the man and the beast who stand together, side by side, on the same hill-top, are, notwithstanding their proximity, the denizens of very different worlds. And I have felt the remark to apply still more strongly when sitting beside the dead. The world of intellect and feeling in which we ourselves are, and of which the lower propensities of our nature form a province, may be regarded as including, in part at least, that world of pa.s.sion and instinct in which the brute lives; and we have but to a.n.a.lyse and abstract a little, to form for ourselves ideas of this latter world from even our own experience. But by what process of thought can we bring experience to bear on the world of the dead? It lies entirely beyond us--a _terra incognita_ of cloud and darkness, and yet the thing at our side--the thing over which we can stretch our hand--the thing dead to us but living to _it_--has entered upon it, and, however uninformed or ignorant before, knows more of its dark, and, to us, inscrutable mysteries, than all our philosophers and all our divines. Is it wonder that we would fain _put it to the question_--that we would fain catechise it, if we could, regarding its newly-acquired experience--that we should fill up the gaps in the dialogue which its silence leaves to us, by imparting to one another the little we know regarding its _state_ and its _place_--or that we should send our thoughts roaming in long excursions, to glean from the experience of the past all that it tells us of the occasional visits of the dead, and all that in their less taciturn and more social moments they have communicated to the living. And hence, from feelings so natural, and a train of a.s.sociations so obvious, the character of a country lykewake and the cast of its stories--I say a _country_ lykewake, for in at least all our larger towns, where a cold and barren scepticism has chilled the feelings and imaginations of the people, without, I fear, much improving their judgments, the conversation on such occasions takes a lower and less interesting range.
I once spent a night with a friend from the south, a man of an inquiring and highly philosophic cast of mind, at a lykewake in the upper part of the parish of Cromarty. I had excited his curiosity by an incidental remark or two of the kind I have just been dropping; and, on his expressing a wish that I should introduce him, by way of ill.u.s.tration, to some such scenes as I have been describing, we had set out together to the wake of an elderly female who had died that morning. Her cottage--a humble creation of stone and lime--was situated beside a thick fir wood, on the edge of the solitary Mulebuy, one of the dreariest and most extensive commons in Scotland. We had to pa.s.s, in our journey, over several miles of desolate muir, sprinkled with cairns and tumuli--the memorials of some forgotten conflict of the past; we had to pa.s.s, too, through a thick, dark wood, with here and there an intervening marsh, whitened over with moss and lichens, and which, from this circ.u.mstance, are known to the people of the country as the _white bogs_. Nor was the more distant landscape of a less gloomy character. On the one hand, there opened an interminable expanse of muir, that went stretching onwards, mile beyond mile, bleak, dreary, uninhabited, and uninhabitable, till it merged into the far horizon. On the other, there rose a range of blue, solitary hills, towering, as they receded, into loftier peaks and bolder acclivities, till they terminated on the snow-streaked Ben Weavis. The season, too, was in keeping with the scene. It was drawing towards the close of autumn; and, as we pa.s.sed through the wood, the falling leaves were eddying round us with every wind, or lay in rustling heaps at our feet.
"I do not wonder," said my companion, "that the superst.i.tions of so wild a district as this should bear in their character some marks of a corresponding wildness. Night itself, in a populous and cultivated country, is attended with less of the stern and the solemn than mid-day amid solitudes like these. Is the custom of watching beside the dead of remote antiquity in this part of the country?"
"Far beyond the reach of either history or tradition," I said. "But it has gradually been changing its character, as the people have been changing theirs; and is now a very different thing from what it was a century ago. It is not yet ninety years since lykewakes in the neighbouring Highlands used to be celebrated with music and dancing; and even here, on the borders of the low country, they used invariably, like the funerals of antiquity, to be the scenes of wild games and amus.e.m.e.nts, never introduced on any other occasion. You remember how Sir Walter describes the funeral of Athelstane. The Saxon ideas of condolence were the most natural imaginable. If grief was hungry, they supplied it with food, if thirsty, they gave it drink. Our simple ancestors here seem to have reasoned by a similar process. They made their seasons of deepest grief their times of greatest merriment; and the more they regretted the deceased, the gayer were they at his wake and his funeral. A friend of mine, now dead, a very old man, has told me that he once danced at a lykewake in the Highlands of Sutherland. It was that of an active and very robust man, taken away from his wife and family in the prime of life; and the poor widow, for the greater part of the evening, sat disconsolate beside the fire, refusing every invitation to join the dancers. She was at length, however, brought out by the father of the deceased. "Little, little did he think," he said, "that she would be the last to dance at poor Rory"s lykewake.""
We reached the cottage, and went in. The apartment in which the dead lay was occupied by two men and three women. Every little piece of furniture it contained was hung in white, and the floor had recently been swept and sanded; but it was on the bed where the body lay, and on the body itself, that the greatest care had been lavished. The curtains had been taken down, and their place supplied by linen white as snow; and on the sheet that served as a counterpane, the body was laid out in a dress of white, fantastically crossed and recrossed in every direction by scalloped fringes, and fretted into a species of open work, at least intended to represent alternate rows of roses and tulips. A plate containing a little salt was placed over the breast of the corpse. As we entered, one of the women rose; and, filling two gla.s.ses with spirits, presented them to us on a salver. We tasted the liquor, and sat down on chairs placed for us beside the fire. The conversation, which had been interrupted by our entrance, began to flow apace; and an elderly female, who had lived under the same roof with the deceased, began to relate, in answer to the queries of one of the others, some of the particulars of her last illness and death.
THE STORY OF ELSPAT M"CULLOCH.
"Elspat was aye," she said, "a retired body, wi" a cast o" decent pride aboot her; an", though bare an" puirly aff sometimes, in her auld days, she had never been chargeable to onybody. She had come o" decent, "sponsible people, though they were a" low aneugh the day--ay, an" they were G.o.d-fearing people, too, wha had gien plenty in their time, and had aye plenty to gie. An" though they had been a" langsyne laid in the kirkyard--a" except hersel, puir body!--she wouldna disgrace their guid name, she said, by takin an alms frae ony ane. Her sma" means fell oot o" her hands afore her last illness. Little had aye dune her turn--but the little failed at last; an" sair, sair thocht did it gie her, for a while, what was to come o" her. I could hear her, in the b.u.t.t-end o" the house, ae mornin, mair earnest an" langer in her prayers than usual--though she never neglected them, puir body--an" a" the early part o" that day she seemed to be no weel. She was aye up and down; an" I could ance or twice hear her gaunting at the fireside; but, when I went ben to her, an" asked what was the matter wi" her, she said she was just in her ordinar. She went oot for a wee; an" what did I do but gang to her amry, for I jaloused a" wasna richt there; an", oh! it was a sair sicht to see, neebors; but there was neither a bit o" bread nor a grain o" meal within its four corners--naething but the sealed-up greybeard, wi" the whisky, that, for twenty years an" mair, she had been keeping for her lykewake; an", ye ken, it was oot o" the question to think that she would meddle wi" it. Weel did I scold her, when she cam in, for being sae close-minded. I asked her what harm I had ever done to her, that she would rather hae died than hae trusted her wants to me; but, though she said nothing, I could see the tears in her ee; an" sae I stopped, and we took a late breakfast thegither at my fireside.
"She tauld me that mornin that she weel kent she wouldna lang be a trouble to onybody. The day afore had been Sabbath, an" every Sabbath mornin, for the last ten years, her worthy neebor the elder, whom they had buried only four days afore, used to call on her, in the pa.s.sing on his way to the kirk. "Come awa, Elspat," he would say; an" she used to be aye decent an" ready; for she liked his conversation; an" they aye gaed thegither to the kirk. She had been contracted, when a young la.s.s, to a brither o" the elder"s--a stout, handsome lad; but he had been ca"ed suddenly awa, atween the contract an" the marriage, an"
Elspat, though she had afterwards mony a guid offer, had lived single for his sake. Weel, on the very mornin afore, just sax days after the elder"s death, an" four after his burial, when Elspat was sittin dowie aside the fire, thinkin" o" her guid auld neebor, the cry cam to the door just as it used to do; but, though the voice was the same, the words were a wee different. "Elspat," it said, "mak ready an" come awa."
She rose hastily to the window, an" there, sure enough, was the elder turning the corner in his Sunday"s bonnet an" his Sunday"s coat. An"
weel did she ken, she said, the meanin o" his call, and kindly did she tak it. An" if it was but G.o.d"s wull that she suld hae enough to put her decently under the ground without going in debt to ony one, she would be weel content. She had already the linen for the dead-dress, she said; for she had span it for the purpose afore her contract wi" William, an"
she had the whisky, too, for the wake; but she had naething anent the coffin an" the bedral.
"Weel, we took our breakfast, an" I did my best to comfort the puir body; but she looked very down-hearted for a" that. Aboot the middle o"
the day, in cam the minister"s boy wi" a letter. It was directed to his master, he said; but it was a" for Elspat; an" there was a five-pound note in it. It was frae a man who had left the country, mony, mony a year afore, a guid deal in her faither"s debt. You would hae thought the puir thing wad hae grat her een out when she saw the money; but never was money mair thankfully received, or taen mair directly frae Heaven.
It set her aboon the warld, she said; an" coming at the time it did, an estate o" a thousand a-year wadna be o" mair use to her. Next mornin she didna rise, for her strength had failed her at ance, though she felt nae meikle pain, an" she sent me to get the note changed, an" to leave twenty shillings o"t wi" the wright for a decent coffin, like her mither"s, an" five shillings mair wi" the bedral, an" to tak in necessaries for a sick-bed wi" some o" the lave. Weel, I did that; an"
there"s still twa pounds o" the note yonder in the little cupboard.
"On the fifth mornin after she had been taken sae ill, I came in till ask after her--for my neebor here had relieved me o" that night"s watchin, and I had gotten to my bed. The moment I opened the door I saw that the hail room was hung in white, just as ye" see it now; an" I"m sure it staid that way a minute or sae; but when I winked it went awa. I kent there was a change no far off; an" when I went up to the bed, Elspat didna ken me. She was wirkin wi" her hand at the blankets, as if she were pickin aff the little motes; an" I could hear the beginning o"
the dead rattle in her throat. I sat at her bedside for awhile, wi" my neebor here; and when she spoke to us, it was to say that the bed had grown hard and uneasy, and that she wished to be brought oot to the chair. Weel, we indulged her, though we baith kent that it wasna in the bed the uneasiness lay. Her mind, puir body, was carried at the time; she just kent that there was to be a death an" a lykewake; but no that the death an" the lykewake were to be her ain; an" whan she looked at the bed, she bade us tak down the black curtains an" put up the white; an" tauld us where the white were to be found.
""But where is the corp?" she said; "it"s no there--where is the corp?"
""O Elspat, it will be there vera soon," said my neebor; an" that satisfied her.
"She cam to hersel an hour afore she departed. G.o.d had been very guid to her, she said, a" her life lang, an" he hadna forsaken her at the last.
He had been guid to her when he had gien her friens, an" guid to her when he took them to himsel; an" she kent she was now going to baith Him and them. There wasna such a difference, she said, atween life and death as folk were ready to think. She was sure that, though William had been ca"ed awa suddenly, he hadna been ca"ed without being prepared; an" now that her turn had come, an" that she was goin to meet wi" him, it was maybe as weel that he had left her early; for, till she had lost him, she had been owre licht an" thochtless; an" had it been her lot to hae lived in happiness wi" him, she micht hae remained licht an" thochtless still. She bade us baith fareweel, an" thanked an" blessed us; an" her last breath went awa in a prayer no half-an-hour after. Puir, decent body!--but she"s no puir now."
"A pretty portrait," whispered my companion, "of one of a cla.s.s fast wearing away. Nothing more interests me in the story than the woman"s undoubting faith in the supernatural; she does not even seem to know that what she believes so firmly herself, is so much as doubted by others. Try whether you can"t bring up, by some means, a few other stories furnished with a similar machinery--a story of the second sight, for instance."
"The only way of accomplishing that," I replied, "is by contributing a story of the kind myself."
"The vision of the room hung in white," I said, "reminds me of a story related, about a hundred and fifty years ago, by a very learned and very ingenious countryman of ours--George, first Earl of Cromarty. His lordship, a steady Royalist, was engaged, shortly before the Restoration (he was then, by the way, only Sir George Mackenzie), in raising troops for the king, on his lands on the western coast of Ross-shire. There came on one of those days of rain and tempest so common in the district; and Sir George, with some of his friends, were storm-bound in a solitary cottage, somewhere on the sh.o.r.es of Loch Broom. Towards evening, one of the party went out to look after their horses. He had been sitting beside Sir George, and the chair he had occupied remained empty. On Sir George"s servant, an elderly Highlander, coming in, he went up to his master, apparently much appalled, and, tapping him on the shoulder, urged him to rise. "Rise!" he said, "rise! There"s a dead man sitting on the chair beside you." The whole party immediately started to their feet; but they saw only the empty chair. The dead man was visible to the Highlander alone. His head was bound up, he said, and his face streaked with blood, and one of his arms hung broken by his side. Next day, as a party of hors.e.m.e.n were pa.s.sing along the steep side of a hill in the neighbourhood, one of the horses stumbled, and threw its rider; and the man, grievously injured by the fall, was carried, in a state of insensibility, to the cottage. His head was deeply gashed, and one of his arms was broken, though he ultimately recovered; and, on being brought to the cottage, he was placed, in a death-like swoon, in the identical chair which the Highlander had seen occupied by the spectre.
Sir George relates the story, with many a similar story besides, in a letter to the celebrated Robert Boyle."
"I have perused it with much interest," said my friend "and wonder our booksellers should have suffered it to become so scarce. Do you not remember the somewhat similar story his lordship relates of the Highlander who saw the apparition of a troop of horse ride over the brow of a hill, and enter a field of oats, which, though it had been sown only a few days before, the hors.e.m.e.n seemed to cut down with their swords. He states that, a few months after, a troop of cavalry actually entered the same field, and carried away the produce, for fodder to their horses. He tells, too, if I remember aright, that, on the same expedition to which your story belongs, one of his Highlanders, on entering a cottage, started back with horror;--he had met in the pa.s.sage, he said, a dead man in his shroud, and saw people gathering for a funeral. And, as his lordship relates, one of the inmates of the cottage, who was in perfect health, at the time of the vision, died suddenly only two days after."
THE STORY OF DONALD GAIR.
"The second night," said an elderly man, who sat beside me, and whose countenance had struck me as highly expressive of serious thought, "is fast wearing out of this part of the country. Nor should we much regret it, perhaps. It seemed, if I may so speak, as something outside the ordinary dispositions of Providence, and, with all the horror and unhappiness that attended it, served no apparent good end. I have been a traveller in my youth, masters. About thirty years ago, I served for some time in the navy. I entered on the first breaking out of the Revolutionary War, and was discharged during the short peace of 1801.
One of my chief companions on shipboard, for the first few years, was a young man, a native of Sutherland, named Donald Gair. Donald, like most of his countrymen was a staid, decent lad, of a rather melancholy cast; and yet there was occasions when he could be quite gay enough too. We sailed together in the Bedford, under Sir Thomas Baird; and, after witnessing the mutiny at the Nore--neither of us did much more than witness it, for in our case it merely transferred the command of the vessel from a very excellent captain to a set of low Irish doctor"s-list men--we joined Admiral Duncan, then on the Dutch station. We were barely in time to take part in the great action. Donald had been unusually gay all the previous evening. We knew the Dutch had come out, and that there was to be an engagement on the morrow; and, though I felt no fear, the thought that I might have to stand in a few brief hours before my Maker and my Judge, had the effect of rendering me serious. But my companion seemed to have lost all command of himself; he sang, and leaped, and shouted--not like one intoxicated--there was nothing of intoxication about him--but under the influence of a wild irrepressible flow of spirits. I took him seriously to task, and reminded him that we might both at that moment be standing on the verge of death and judgment. But he seemed more impressed by my remarking, that were his mother to see him, she would say he was _fey_.
"We had never been in action before with our captain, Sir Thomas. He was a grave, and, I believe, G.o.d-fearing man, and much a favourite with, at least, all the better seamen. But we had not yet made up our minds on his character--indeed, no sailor ever does, with regard to his officers, till he knows how they fight; and we were all curious to see how the parson, as we used to call him, would behave himself among the shot. But truly we might have had little fear for him. I have sailed with Nelson, and not Nelson himself ever showed more courage or conduct than Sir Thomas in that action. He made us all lie down beside our guns, and steered us, without firing a shot, into the very thickest of the fight; and, when we did open, masters, every broadside told with fearful effect. I never saw a man issue his commands with more coolness or self-possession.
"There are none of our continental neighbours who make better seamen, or who fight more doggedly, than the Dutch. We were in a blaze of flame for four hours. Our rigging was slashed to pieces; and two of our ports were actually knocked into one. There was one fierce, ill-natured Dutchman, in particular--a fellow as black as night, without so much as a speck of paint or gilding about him, save that he had a red lion on the prow--that fought us as long as he had a spar standing; and, when he struck at last, fully one-half the crew lay either dead or wounded on the decks, and all his scupper-holes were running blood as freely as ever they had done water at a deck-washing. The Bedford suffered nearly as severely. It is not in the heat of action that we can reckon on the loss we sustain. I saw my comrades falling around me--falling by the terrible cannon-shot, as they came crashing in through our sides; I felt, too, that our gun wrought more heavily as our numbers were thinning around it; and, at times, when some sweeping chain-shot or fatal splinter laid open before me those horrible mysteries of the inner man which nature so sedulously conceals, I was conscious of a momentary feeling of dread and horror. But, in the prevailing mood, an unthinking anger, a dire thirsting after revenge, a dogged, unyielding firmness, were the chief ingredients. I strained every muscle and sinew; and amid the smoke, and the thunder, and the frightful carnage, fired and loaded, and fired and loaded, and with every discharge sent out, as it were, the bitterness of my whole soul against the enemy. But very different were my feelings when victory declared in our favour, and, exhausted and unstrung, I looked abroad among the dead. As I crossed the deck, my feet literally splashed in blood; and I saw the mangled fragments of human bodies sticking in horrid patches to the sides and beams above. There was a fine little boy aboard, with whom I was an especial favourite. He had been engaged, before the action, in the construction of a toy ship, which he intended sending to his mother; and I used sometimes to a.s.sist him, and to lend him a few simple tools; and, just as we were bearing down on the enemy, he had come running up to me with a knife, which he had borrowed from me a short time before.
""Alick, Alick," he said, "I have brought you your knife; we are going into action, you know, and I may be killed, and then you would loose it."
"Poor little fellow! The first body I recognised was his Both his arms had been fearfully shattered by a cannon-shot, and the surgeon"s tourniquets, which had been fastened below the shoulders, were still there; but he had expired ere the amputating knife had been applied. As I stood beside the body--little in love with war, masters--a comrade came up to me to say that my friend and countryman, Donald Gair, lay mortally wounded in the c.o.c.kpit. I went instantly down to him. But never shall I forget, though never may I attempt to describe, what I witnessed that day, in that frightful scene of death and suffering. Donald lay in a low hammock, raised not a foot over the deck; and there was no one beside him, for the surgeons had seen at a glance the hopelessness of his case, and were busied about others of whom they had hope. He lay on his back, breathing very hard, but perfectly insensible; and in the middle of his forehead there was a round, little hole, without so much as a speck of blood about it, where a musket bullet had pa.s.sed through the brain. He continued to breathe for about two hours; and, when he expired, I wrapped the body decently up in a hammock, and saw it committed to the deep. The years pa.s.sed; and, after looking death in the face in many a storm and many a battle, peace was proclaimed, and I returned to my friends and my country.
"A few weeks after my arrival, an elderly Highland woman, who had travelled all the way from the further side of Loch Shin to see me, came to our door. She was the mother of Donald Gair, and had taken her melancholy journey to hear from me all she might regarding the last moments and death of her son. She had no English, and I had not Gaelic enough to converse with her; but my mother, who had received her with a sympathy all the deeper from the thought that her own son might have been now in Donald"s place, served as our interpreter. She was strangely inquisitive, though the little she heard served only to increase her grief; and you may believe it was not much I could find heart to tell her; for what was there in the circ.u.mstances of my comrade"s death to afford pleasure to his mother? And so I waived her questions regarding his wound and his burial as I best could.
""Ah," said the poor woman to my mother, "he need not be afraid to tell me all. I know too, too well that my Donald"s body was thrown into the sea; I knew of it long ere it happened; and I have long tried to reconcile my mind to it--tried when he was a boy even; and so you need not be afraid to tell me now."
""And how," asked my mother, whose curiosity was excited, "could you have thought of it so early?"
""I lived," rejoined the woman, "at the time of Donald"s birth, in a lonely shieling among the Sutherland hills--a full day"s journey from the nearest church. It was a long, weary road, over muirs and mosses. It was in the winter season, too, when the days are short; and so, in bringing Donald to be baptised, we had to remain a night by the way, in the house of a friend. We there found an old woman of so peculiar an appearance, that, when she asked me for the child, I at first declined giving it, fearing she was mad, and might do it harm. The people of the house, however, a.s.sured me she was incapable of hurting it; and so I placed it on her lap. She took it up in her arms, and began to sing to it; but it was such a song as none of us had ever heard before."
""Poor little stranger!" she said, "thou hast come into the world in an evil time. The mists are on the hills, gloomy and dark, and the rain lies chill on the heather; and thou, poor little thing! hast a long journey through the sharp, biting winds, and thou art helpless and cold.
Oh! but thy long after-journey is as dreary and dark. A wanderer shalt thou be over the land and the ocean; and in the ocean shalt thou lie at last. Poor little thing! I have waited for thee long. I saw thee in thy wanderings, and in thy shroud, ere thy mother brought thee to the door; and the sounds of the sea, and of the deadly guns, are still ringing in my ears. Go, poor little thing! to thy mother--bitterly shall she yet weep for thee--and no wonder; but no one shall ever weep over thy grave, or mark where thou liest amid the deep green, with the shark and the seal."
""From that evening," continued the mother of my friend, "I have tried to reconcile my mind to what was to happen Donald. But, oh! the fond, foolish heart! I loved him more than any of his brothers, because I was to lose him soon; and though, when he left me, I took farewell of him for ever, for I knew I was never--never to see him more, I felt, till the news reached me of his fall in battle, as if he were living in his coffin. But, oh, do tell me all you know of his death. I am old and weak, but I have travelled far, far to see you, that I might hear all; and surely, for the regard you bore to Donald, you will not suffer me to return as I came."
"But I need not dwell longer on the story. I imparted to the poor woman all the circ.u.mstances of her son"s death, as I have done to you; and, shocking as they may seem, I found that she felt rather relieved than otherwise."
"This is not quite the country of the second sight," said my friend; "it is too much on the borders of the Lowlands. The gift seems restricted to the Highlands alone, and it is now fast wearing out even there."
"And weel it is," said one of the men, "that it should be sae. It is surely a miserable thing to ken o" coming evil, if we just merely ken that it is coming, an" that come it must, do what we may. Hae ye ever heard the story o" the kelpie that wons in the Conan?"
My friend replied in the negative.
THE STORY OF THE DOOMED RIDER.
"The Conan," continued the man, "is as bonny a river as we hae in a" the north country. There"s mony a sweet sunny spot on its banks; an" mony a time an" aft hae I waded through its shallows, whan a boy, to set my little scantling-line for the trouts an" the eels, or to gather the big pearl-mussels that lie sae thick in the fords. But its bonny wooded banks are places for enjoying the day in--no for pa.s.sing the nicht. I kenna how it is; it"s nane o" your wild streams that wander desolate through a desert country, like the Aven, or that come rushing down in foam and thunder, owre broken rocks, like the Foyers, or that wallow in darkness, deep, deep in the bowels o" the earth, like the fearfu"
Auldgraunt; an" yet no ane o" these rivers has mair or frightfuller stories connected wi" it than the Conan. Ane can hardly saunter owre half-a-mile in its course, frae where it leaves Contin till where it enters the sea, without pa.s.sing owre the scene o" some frightful auld legend o" the kelpie or the water-wraith. An" ane o" the maist frightfu"-looking o" these places is to be found among the woods o"
Conan House. Ye enter a swampy meadow, that waves wi" flags an" rushes like a corn-field in harvest, an" see a hillock covered wi" willows rising like an island in the midst. There are thick mirk woods on ilka side; the river, dark an" awesome, an" whirling round an" round in mossy eddies, sweeps awa behind it; an" there is an auld burying-ground, wi"
the broken ruins o" an auld Papist kirk, on the tap. Ane can still see amang the rougher stanes the rose-wrought mullions o" an arched window, an" the trough that ance held the haly water. About twa hunder years ago--a wee mair maybe or a wee less, for ane canna be very sure o" the date o" thae auld stories--the building was entire; an" a spot near it, whar the wood now grows thickest, was laid out in a corn-field. The marks o" the furrows may still be seen amang the trees. A party o"
Highlanders were busily engaged, ae day in harvest, in cutting down the corn o" that field; an", just aboot noon, when the sun shone brightest an" they were busiest in the work, they heard a voice frae the river exclaim, "_The hour but not the man has come_." Sure enough, on looking round, there was the kelpie stan"in in what they ca" a fause ford, just fornent the auld kirk. There is a deep black pool baith aboon an" below, but i" the ford there"s a bonny ripple, that shows, as ane might think, but little depth o" water; an" just i" the middle o" that, in a place where a horse might swim, stood the kelpie. An" it again repeated its words--"_The hour but not the man has come_;" an" then, flashing through the water like a drake, it disappeared in the lower pool. When the folk stood wondering what the creature micht mean, they saw a man on horseback come spurring down the hill in hot haste, making straight for the fause ford. They could then understand her words at ance; an" four o" the stoutest o" them sprang oot frae amang the corn to warn him o"
his danger, an" keep him back. An" sae they tauld him what they had seen an" heard, an" urged him either to turn back an" tak anither road, or stay for an hour or sae where he was. But he just wadna hear them, for he was baith unbelieving an" in haste, an" wauld hae taen the ford for a" they could say, hadna the Highlanders, determined on saving him whether he would or no, gathered round him, an" pulled him frae his horse, an" then, to mak sure o" him, locked him up in the auld kirk.
Weel, when the hour had gone by--the fatal hour o" the kelpie--they flung open the door, an" cried to him that he might noo gang on his journey. Ah! but there was nae answer, though; an" sae they cried a second time, an" there was nae answer still; an" then they went in, an"
found him lying stiff an" cauld on the floor, wi" his face buried in the water o" the very stone trough that we may still see amang the ruins.
His hour had come, an" he had fallen in a fit, as "twould seem, head foremost among the water o" the trough, where he had been smothered--an"
sae, ye see, the prophecy o" the kelpie availed naething."
"The very story," exclaimed my friend, "to which Sir Walter alludes, in one of the notes to "The Heart of Midlothian." The kelpie, you may remember, furnishes him with a motto to the chapter in which he describes the gathering of all Edinburgh to witness the execution of Porteous; and their irrepressible wrath, on ascertaining that there was to be no execution--"_The hour but not the man has come_.""
"I remember making quite the same discovery," I replied, "about twelve years ago, when I resided for several months on the banks of the Conan, not half-a-mile from the scene of the story. One might fill a little book with legends of the Conan. The fords of the river are dangerous, especially in the winter season; and, about thirty years ago, before the erection of the fine stone bridge below Conan House, scarcely a winter pa.s.sed in which fatal accidents did not occur; and these were almost invariably traced to the murderous malice of the water-wraith."