xact expression, even
though to him at the second reading it meant nothing definite. He jumps
to conclusions again and again in what he writes about birds, where I
can follow him on a certain footing of knowledge. If he is so careless
about facts, if he can, even though it is a slip, confuse Mary Magdalene
and the Virgin Mary, if he can mention birds in a description of
Highland landscape that is characteristic of a certain time of year when
birds of that species would be in the Highlands only by accident at that
time of year, it is more than likely, slips though these may be, that
there will be similar slips in all he writes, no fewer, it is likely, in
his writings of psychic things than elsewhere.

There is possible, of course, no hard-and-fast classification of his
writings. Class shades into class almost imperceptibly. It is
particularly difficult to draw the line between the several kinds of
stories and sketches he writes that involve supernaturalism of one kind
and another. There is possible, however, a rough-and-ready distinction
between those stories of his which are esoterically mystical and those
which, while concerned with the supernatural, are concerned with it in
the way familiar in old romance. Of this "usual supernatural" are those
in which "second sight" is the motive, second sight which is always to
be looked for as the commonest supernatural motive in the writing of all
Gaels, either Alban or Irish. Sharp introduced "second sight" into "The
Son of Allan" (1881); it is in "Pharais" (1894), the first of his "F.M."
work; it is developed at some length in "Iona" (1900), which is a
microcosm of all his writing. In "Iona," Sharp puts himself on record as
holding stoutly belief in the reality of the power:--

The faculty itself is so apt to the spiritual law that one wonders
why it is so set apart in doubt. It would, I think, be far stranger
if there were no such faculties. That I believe, it were needless
to say, were it not that these words may be read by many to whom
this quickened inward vision is a superstition, or a fantastic
glorification of insight.

The Achannas, in the uncanny stories in which they are heroes and
villains, are all possessed by the power of the second sight, but second
sight is not the most remarkable of their supernatural powers. Hypnotic
suggestion Gloom uses as an everyday agent in his affairs. It is through
hypnotic suggestion that he puts madness