rian clergy
generally made war on the belief, but one of them, as Mrs. Grant
reports in her Essays, {244} had an experience of his own. This
good old pastor's 'daidling bit,' or lounge, was his churchyard. In
an October twilight, he saw two small lights rise from a spot
unmarked by any stone or memorial. These 'corpse-candles' crossed
the river, stopped at a hamlet, and returned, attended by a larger
light. All three sank into the earth on the spot whence the two
lights had risen. The minister threw a few stones on the spot, and
next day asked the sexton who lay there. The man remembered having
buried there two children of a blacksmith who lived at the hamlet on
the opposite side of the water. The blacksmith died next day! This
did more for second sight, probably, than all the minister's sermons
could do against the belief.

As we began by stating, it is a popular superstition among the
learned that the belief in second sight has died out among the
Highlanders. Fifty years ago, Dr. McCulloch, in his Description of
the Western Islands, wrote thus: 'Second sight has undergone the
fate of witchcraft; ceasing to be believed, it has ceased to exist'.
{245} Now, as to whether second sight exists or not, we may think
as we please, but the belief in second sight is still vivacious in
the Highlands, and has not altered in a single feature. A well-
known Highland minister has been kind enough to answer a few
questions on the belief as it is in his parish He first met a
second-sighted man in his own beadle, 'a most respectable person of
entirely blameless life'. After citing a few examples of the
beadle's successful hits, our informant says: 'He told me that he
felt the thing coming on, and that it was always preceded by a sense
of discomfort and anxiety. . . . There was no epilepsy, and no
convulsion of any kind. He felt a sense of great relief when the
vision had passed away, and he assured me repeatedly that the gift
was an annoyance rather than a pleasure to him,' as the Lapp also
confessed to Scheffer. 'Others who had the same gift have told me
the same thing.' Out of seven or eight people liable to this
malady, or whatever we are to call it, only one, we learn, was other
than robust, healthy, and steady. In two instances the seers were
examined by a physician of experience, and got clean bills of mental
and bodily health. An instance is mentioned in which the beadle,
alone in a boat with a friend, on a