ne since. She says
she had a gentleman who came thirty miles to her to hear the relation;
and that she had told it to a roomful of people at the time. Several
particular gentlemen have had the story from Mrs. Bargrave's own
mouth.

This thing has very much affected me, and I am as well satisfied as
I am of the best-grounded matter of fact. And why we should dispute
matter of fact, because we cannot solve things of which we can have no
certain or demonstrative notions, seems strange to me; Mrs. Bargrave's
authority and sincerity alone would have been undoubted in any other
case.

THE MYSTERIOUS BRIDE[1]

[Footnote 1: From _Tales and Sketches_, by the Ettrick Shepherd.]

_James Hogg_ (1770-1835)

A great number of people nowadays are beginning broadly to insinuate
that there are no such things as ghosts, or spiritual beings visible
to mortal sight. Even Sir Walter Scott is turned renegade, and, with
his stories made up of half-and-half, like Nathaniel Gow's toddy,
is trying to throw cold water on the most certain, though most
impalpable, phenomena of human nature. The bodies are daft. Heaven
mend their wits! Before they had ventured to assert such things, I
wish they had been where I have often been; or, in particular, where
the Laird of Birkendelly was on St. Lawrence's Eve, in the year 1777,
and sundry times subsequent to that.

Be it known, then, to every reader of this relation of facts that
happened in my own remembrance that the road from Birkendelly to the
great muckle village of Balmawhapple (commonly called the muckle town,
in opposition to the little town that stood on the other side of the
burn)--that road, I say, lay between two thorn-hedges, so well kept
by the Laird's hedger, so close, and so high, that a rabbit could not
have escaped from the highway into any of the adjoining fields. Along
this road was the Laird riding on the Eve of St. Lawrence, in a
careless, indifferent manner, with his hat to one side, and his cane
dancing a hornpipe before him. He was, moreover, chanting a song to
himself, and I have heard people tell what song it was too. There was
once a certain, or rather uncertain, bard, ycleped Robert Burns, who
made a number of good songs; but this that the Laird sang was an
amorous song of great antiquity, which, like all the said bard's best
songs, was sung one hundred and fifty years before he was born. It
began thus:

"I am the Laird of Windy-wa's,
I cam nae here witho