de,
"and tells him that he was very much persuaded his wife was a devil, and
indeed he could not salute her; and after some discourse prevailed so
far with him as to follow his advice, which was to go with her and take
her to that room where he found her, and lay her down upon the bed where
he found her, and quit her of a devil. Which he did, and immediately she
became a dead corpse half consumed." "This had need," says cautious
Wodrow, "to be weel attested, and I have writ to Mr Reid anent it."
Curiosity urged me to look for and find among Wodrow's manuscripts Mr
Reid's answer. He says he often heard the story from his father as a
truth, but had been unaccountably negligent in noting the particulars of
it; and then he favours his correspondent with some special providences
anent himself, which appear not to have been sufficiently pungent for
Wodrow's taste.

A philosophical investigator of the established national superstitions
would find excellent types of all of them in the Analecta. In the
department of second-sight, for instance, restricted, with due
observance to geographical propriety, within the Highland line, a guest
disturbs a convivial meeting at Blair-Athol by exclaiming that he
beholds a dirk sticking in the breast of their entertainer. That night
he is stabbed to the heart; and even while the seer beheld the visionary
dagger, a bare-legged gilly was watching outside to execute a
long-cherished Highland vengeance. The Marquess of Argyle, who was
afterwards beheaded, was playing with some of his clan at bowls, or
bullets, as Wodrow calls them, for he was not learned in the
nomenclature of vain recreations. "One of the players, when the Marquess
stooped down to lift the bullet, fell pale, and said to them about him,
'Bless me! what is that I see?--my Lord with the head off, and all his
shoulders full of blood.'"

In the department of fairy tricks, the infant of Thomas Paton, "a very
eminent Christian," in its first use of speech, rattles out a volley of
terrific oaths, then eats two cheeses, and attempts to cut its brother's
throat. This was surely sufficient evidence to satisfy the most
sceptical that it was a changeling, even had it not, as the result of
certain well-applied prayers, "left the house with an extraordinary
howling and crying."

Ghost and witch stories abound. The following is selected on account of
the eminence of its hero, Gilbert Rule, the founder and first Principal
of the University o