lained, nor could this rational belief of his be shaken.
The affair led to a conversation on the second sight, and Campbell
said, 'he had it not,' 'but his sister (or sister-in-law) had it'.

Campbell was a very agreeable companion, interested in old events,
and a sympathiser, as he said, in spite of his name, with the great
Montrose. His remarks led the author to infer that, contrary to
what some inquirers wrote in the last, and Graham Dalyell in the
present century, the belief in the second sight is still quite
common in the Highlands. As will be shown later, this inference was
correct.

We must not, from this survival only, draw the conclusion that the
Highlanders are more superstitious than many educated people south
of the Highland line. Second sight is only a Scotch name which
covers many cases called telepathy and clairvoyance by psychical
students, and casual or morbid hallucinations by other people. In
second sight the percipient beholds events occurring at a distance,
sees people whom he never saw with the bodily eye, and who
afterwards arrive in his neighbourhood; or foresees events
approaching but still remote in time. The chief peculiarity of
second sight is, that the visions often, though not always, are of a
_symbolical_ character. A shroud is observed around the living man
who is doomed; boding animals, mostly black dogs, vex the seer;
funerals are witnessed before they occur, and 'corpse-candles' (some
sort of light) are watched flitting above the road whereby a burial
procession is to take its way. {228} Though we most frequently hear
the term 'second sight' applied as a phrase of Scotch superstition,
the belief in this kind of ominous illusion is obviously universal.
Theoclymenus, in the Odyssey, a prophet by descent, and of the same
clan as the soothsayer Melampus, beholds the bodies and faces of the
doomed wooers, 'shrouded in night'. The Pythia at Delphi announced
a similar symbolic vision of blood-dripping walls to the Athenians,
during the Persian War. Again, symbolic visions, especially of
blood-dripping walls, are so common in the Icelandic sagas that the
reader need only be referred to the prodigies before the burning of
Njal, in the Saga of Burnt Njal. Second sight was as popular a
belief among the Vikings as among the Highlanders who retain a large
share of their blood. It may be argued by students who believe in
the borrowing rather than in the independent evolution of ideas,