e awoke
him to join the Portsmouth coach. Jarvis Matcham was found guilty and
executed. When his last chance of life was over he returned to his
confession, and with his dying breath averred, and truly, as he thought,
the truth of the vision on Salisbury Plain. Similar stories might be
produced, showing plainly that, under the direction of Heaven, the
influence of superstitious fear may be the appointed means of bringing
the criminal to repentance for his own sake, and to punishment for the
advantage of society.

Cases of this kind are numerous and easily imagined, so I shall dwell on
them no further; but rather advert to at least an equally abundant class
of ghost stories, in which the apparition is pleased not to torment the
actual murderer, but proceeds in a very circuitous manner, acquainting
some stranger or ignorant old woman with the particulars of his fate,
who, though perhaps unacquainted with all the parties, is directed by a
phantom to lay the facts before a magistrate. In this respect we must
certainly allow that ghosts have, as we are informed by the facetious
Captain Grose, forms and customs peculiar to themselves.

There would be no edification and little amusement in treating of clumsy
deceptions of this kind, where the grossness of the imposture detects
itself. But occasionally cases occur like the following, with respect to
which it is more difficult, to use James Boswell's phrase, "to know what
to think."

Upon the 10th of June, 1754, Duncan Terig, _alias_ Clark, and Alexander
Bain MacDonald, two Highlanders, were tried before the Court of
Justiciary, Edinburgh, for the murder of Arthur Davis, sergeant in
Guise's regiment, on the 28th September, 1749. The accident happened not
long after the civil war, the embers of which were still reeking, so
there existed too many reasons on account of which an English soldier,
straggling far from assistance, might be privately cut off by the
inhabitants of these wilds. It appears that Sergeant Davis was missing
for years, without any certainty as to his fate. At length, an account
of the murder appeared from the evidence of one Alexander MacPherson (a
Highlander, speaking no language but Gaelic, and sworn by an
interpreter), who gave the following extraordinary account of his cause
of knowledge:--He was, he said, in bed in his cottage, when an
apparition came to his bedside and commanded him to rise and follow him
out of doors. Believing his visitor to be one F