has gradually been changing its character, as the people have been
changing theirs; and is now a very different thing from what it was a
century ago. It is not yet ninety years since lykewakes in the
neighbouring Highlands used to be celebrated with music and dancing; and
even here, on the borders of the low country, they used invariably, like
the funerals of antiquity, to be the scenes of wild games and
amusements, never introduced on any other occasion. You remember how Sir
Walter describes the funeral of Athelstane. The Saxon ideas of
condolence were the most natural imaginable. If grief was hungry, they
supplied it with food, if thirsty, they gave it drink. Our simple
ancestors here seem to have reasoned by a similar process. They made
their seasons of deepest grief their times of greatest merriment; and
the more they regretted the deceased, the gayer were they at his wake
and his funeral. A friend of mine, now dead, a very old man, has told me
that he once danced at a lykewake in the Highlands of Sutherland. It was
that of an active and very robust man, taken away from his wife and
family in the prime of life; and the poor widow, for the greater part of
the evening, sat disconsolate beside the fire, refusing every invitation
to join the dancers. She was at length, however, brought out by the
father of the deceased. 'Little, little did he think,' he said, 'that
she would be the last to dance at poor Rory's lykewake.'"
We reached the cottage, and went in. The apartment in which the dead lay
was occupied by two men and three women. Every little piece of furniture
it contained was hung in white, and the floor had recently been swept
and sanded; but it was on the bed where the body lay, and on the body
itself, that the greatest care had been lavished. The curtains had been
taken down, and their place supplied by linen white as snow; and on the
sheet that served as a counterpane, the body was laid out in a dress of
white, fantastically crossed and recrossed in every direction by
scalloped fringes, and fretted into a species of open work, at least
intended to represent alternate rows of roses and tulips. A plate
containing a little salt was placed over the breast of the corpse. As we
entered, one of the women rose; and, filling two glasses with spirits,
presented them to us on a salver. We tasted the liquor, and sat down on
chairs placed for us beside the fire. The conversation, which had been
interrupted by our entrance, began to flow apace; and an elderly female,
who had lived under the same roof with the deceased, began to relate, in
answer to the queries of one of the others, some of the particulars of
her last illness and death.
THE STORY OF ELSPAT M'CULLOCH.
"Elspat was aye," she said, "a retired body, wi' a cast o' decent pride
aboot her; an', though bare an' puirly aff sometimes, in her auld days,
she had never been chargeable to onybody. She had come o' decent,
'sponsible people, though they were a' low aneugh the day--ay, an' they
were God-fearing people, too, wha had gien plenty in their time, and had
aye plenty to gie. An' though they had been a' langsyne laid in the
kirkyard--a' except hersel, puir body!--she wouldna disgrace their guid
name, she said, by takin an alms frae ony ane. Her sma' means fell oot
o' her hands afore her last illness. Little had aye dune her turn--but
the little failed at last; an' sair, sair thocht did it gie her, for a
while, what was to come o' her. I could hear her, in the butt-end o' the
house, ae mornin, mair earnest an' langer in her prayers than
usual--though she never neglected them, puir body--an' a' the early part
o' that day she seemed to be no weel. She was aye up and down; an' I
could ance or twice hear her gaunting at the fireside; but, when I went
ben to her, an' asked what was the matter wi' her, she said she was just
in her ordinar. She went oot for a wee; an' what did I do but gang to
her amry, for I jaloused a' wasna richt there; an', oh! it was a sair
sicht to see, neebors; but there was neither a bit o' bread nor a grain
o' meal within its four corners--naething but the sealed-up greybeard,
wi' the whisky, that, for twenty years an' mair, she had been keeping
for her lykewake; an', ye ken, it was oot o' the question to think that
she would meddle wi' it. Weel did I scold her, when she cam in, for
being sae close-minded. I asked her what harm I had ever done to her,
that she would rather hae died than hae trusted her wants to me; but,
though she said nothing, I could see the tears in her ee; an' sae I
stopped, and we took a late breakfast thegither at my fireside.
"She tauld me that mornin that she weel kent she wouldna lang be a
trouble to onybody. The day afore had been Sabbath, an' every Sabbath
mornin, for the last ten years, her worthy neebor the elder, whom they
had buried only four days afore, used to call on her, in the passing on
his way to the kirk. 'Come awa, Elspat,' he would say; an' she used to
be aye decent an' ready; for she liked his conversation; an' they aye
gaed thegither to the kirk. She had been contracted, when a young lass,
to a brither o' the elder's--a stout, handsome lad; but he had been
ca'ed suddenly awa, atween the contract an' the marriage, an'
Elspat, though she had afterwards mony a guid offer, had lived single
for his sake. Weel, on the very mornin afore, just sax days after the
elder's death, an' four after his burial, when Elspat was sittin dowie
aside the fire, thinkin' o' her guid auld neebor, the cry cam to the
door just as it used to do; but, though the voice was the same, the
words were a wee different. 'Elspat,' it said, 'mak ready an' come awa.'
She rose hastily to the window, an' there, sure enough, was the elder
turning the corner in his Sunday's bonnet an' his Sunday's coat. An'
weel did she ken, she said, the meanin o' his call, and kindly did she
tak it. An' if it was but God's wull that she suld hae enough to put her
decently under the ground without going in debt to ony one, she would be
weel content. She had already the linen for the dead-dress, she said;
for she had span it for the purpose afore her contract wi' William, an'
she had the whisky, too, for the wake; but she had naething anent the
coffin an' the bedral.
"Weel, we took our breakfast, an' I did my best to comfort the puir
body; but she looked very down-hearted for a' that. Aboot the middle o'
the day, in cam the minister's boy wi' a letter. It was directed to his
master, he said; but it was a' for Elspat; an' there was a five-pound
note in it. It was frae a man who had left the country, mony, mony a
year afore, a guid deal in her faither's debt. You would hae thought the
puir thing wad hae grat her een out when she saw the money; but never
was money mair thankfully received, or taen mair directly frae Heaven.
It set her aboon the warld, she said; an' coming at the time it did, an
estate o' a thousand a-year wadna be o' mair use to her. Next mornin she
didna rise, for her strength had failed her at ance, though she felt
nae meikle pain, an' she sent me to get the note changed, an' to leave
twenty shillings o't wi' the wright for a decent coffin, like her
mither's, an' five shillings mair wi' the bedral, an' to tak in
necessaries for a sick-bed wi' some o' the lave. Weel, I did that; an'
there's still twa pounds o' the note yonder in the little cupboard.
"On the fifth mornin after she had been taken sae ill, I came in till
ask after her--for my neebor here had relieved me o' that night's
watchin, and I had gotten to my bed. The moment I opened the door I saw
that the hail room was hung in white, just as ye' see it now; an' I'm
sure it staid that way a minute or sae; but when I winked it went awa. I
kent there was a change no far off; an' when I went up to the bed,
Elspat didna ken me. She was wirkin wi' her hand at the blankets, as if
she were pickin aff the little motes; an' I could hear the beginning o'
the dead rattle in her throat. I sat at her bedside for awhile, wi' my
neebor here; and when she spoke to us, it was to say that the bed had
grown hard and uneasy, and that she wished to be brought oot to the
chair. Weel, we indulged her, though we baith kent that it wasna in the
bed the uneasiness lay. Her mind, puir body, was carried at the time;
she just kent that there was to be a death an' a lykewake; but no that
the death an' the lykewake were to be her ain; an' whan she looked at
the bed, she bade us tak down the black curtains an' put up the white;
an' tauld us where the white were to be found.
"'But where is the corp?' she said; 'it's no there--where is the corp?'
"'O Elspat, it will be there vera soon,' said my neebor; an' that
satisfied her.
"She cam to hersel an hour afore she departed. God had been very guid to
her, she said, a' her life lang, an' he hadna forsaken her at the last.
He had been guid to her when he had gien her friens, an' guid to her
when he took them to himsel; an' she kent she was now going to baith Him
and them. There wasna such a difference, she said, atween life and death
as folk were ready to think. She was sure that, though William had been
ca'ed awa suddenly, he hadna been ca'ed without being prepared; an' now
that her turn had come, an' that she was goin to meet wi' him, it was
maybe as weel that he had left her early; for, till she had lost him,
she had been owre licht an' thochtless; an' had it been her lot to hae
lived in happiness wi' him, she micht hae remained licht an' thochtless
still. She bade us baith fareweel, an' thanked an' blessed us; an' her
last breath went awa in a prayer no half-an-hour after. Puir, decent
body!--but she's no puir now."
"A pretty portrait," whispered my companion, "of one of a class fast
wearing away. Nothing more interests me in the story than the woman's
undoubting faith in the supernatural; she does not even seem to know
that what she believes so firmly herself, is so much as doubted by
others. Try whether you can't bring up, by some means, a few other
stories furnished with a similar machinery--a story of the second sight,
for instance."
"The only way of accomplishing that," I replied, "is by contributing a
story of the kind myself."
"The vision of the room hung in white," I said, "reminds me of a story
related, about a hundred and fifty years ago, by a very learned and very
ingenious countryman of ours--George, first Earl of Cromarty. His
lordship, a steady Royalist, was engaged, shortly before the Restoration
(he was then, by the way, only Sir George Mackenzie), in raising troops
for the king, on his lands on the western coast of Ross-shire. There
came on one of those days of rain and tempest so common in the district;
and Sir George, with some of his friends, were storm-bound in a solitary
cottage, somewhere on the shores of Loch Broom. Towards evening, one of
the party went out to look after their horses. He had been sitting
beside Sir George, and the chair he had occupied remained empty. On Sir
George's servant, an elderly Highlander, coming in, he went up to his
master, apparently much appalled, and, tapping him on the shoulder,
urged him to rise. 'Rise!' he said, 'rise! There's a dead man sitting on
the chair beside you.' The whole party immediately started to their
feet; but they saw only the empty chair. The dead man was visible to the
Highlander alone. His head was bound up, he said, and his face streaked
with blood, and one of his arms hung broken by his side. Next day, as a
party of horsemen were passing along the steep side of a hill in the
neighbourhood, one of the horses stumbled, and threw its rider; and the
man, grievously injured by the fall, was carried, in a state of
insensibility, to the cottage. His head was deeply gashed, and one of
his arms was broken, though he ultimately recovered; and, on being
brought to the cottage, he was placed, in a death-like swoon, in the
identical chair which the Highlander had seen occupied by the spectre.
Sir George relates the story, with many a similar story besides, in a
letter to the celebrated Robert Boyle."
"I have perused it with much interest," said my friend "and wonder our
booksellers should have suffered it to become so scarce. Do you not
remember the somewhat similar story his lordship relates of the
Highlander who saw the apparition of a troop of horse ride over the brow
of a hill, and enter a field of oats, which, though it had been sown
only a few days before, the horsemen seemed to cut down with their
swords. He states that, a few months after, a troop of cavalry actually
entered the same field, and carried away the produce, for fodder to
their horses. He tells, too, if I remember aright, that, on the same
expedition to which your story belongs, one of his Highlanders, on
entering a cottage, started back with horror;--he had met in the
passage, he said, a dead man in his shroud, and saw people gathering
for a funeral. And, as his lordship relates, one of the inmates of the
cottage, who was in perfect health, at the time of the vision, died
suddenly only two days after."
THE STORY OF DONALD GAIR.
"The second night," said an elderly man, who sat beside me, and whose
countenance had struck me as highly expressive of serious thought, "is
fast wearing out of this part of the country. Nor should we much regret
it, perhaps. It seemed, if I may so speak, as something outside the
ordinary dispositions of Providence, and, with all the horror and
unhappiness that attended it, served no apparent good end. I have been a
traveller in my youth, masters. About thirty years ago, I served for
some time in the navy. I entered on the first breaking out of the
Revolutionary War, and was discharged during the short peace of 1801.
One of my chief companions on shipboard, for the first few years, was a
young man, a native of Sutherland, named Donald Gair. Donald, like most
of his countrymen was a staid, decent lad, of a rather melancholy cast;
and yet there was occasions when he could be quite gay enough too. We
sailed together in the Bedford, under Sir Thomas Baird; and, after
witnessing the mutiny at the Nore--neither of us did much more than
witness it, for in our case it merely transferred the command of the
vessel from a very excellent captain to a set of low Irish doctor's-list
men--we joined Admiral Duncan, then on the Dutch station. We were barely
in time to take part in the great action. Donald had been unusually gay
all the previous evening. We knew the Dutch had come out, and that there
was to be an engagement on the morrow; and, though I felt no fear, the
thought that I might have to stand in a few brief hours before my Maker
and my Judge, had the effect of rendering me serious. But my companion
seemed to have lost all command of himself; he sang, and leaped, and
shouted--not like one intoxicated--there was nothing of intoxication
about him--but under the influence of a wild irrepressible flow of
spirits. I took him seriously to task, and reminded him that we might
both at that moment be standing on the verge of death and judgment. But
he seemed more impressed by my remarking, that were his mother to see
him, she would say he was _fey_.
"We had never been in action before with our captain, Sir Thomas. He was
a grave, and, I believe, God-fearing man, and much a favourite with, at
least, all the better seamen. But we had not yet made up our minds on
his character--indeed, no sailor ever does, with regard to his officers,
till he knows how they fight; and we were all curious to see how the
parson, as we used to call him, would behave himself among the shot. But
truly we might have had little fear for him. I have sailed with Nelson,
and not Nelson himself ever showed more courage or conduct than Sir
Thomas in that action. He made us all lie down beside our guns, and
steered us, without firing a shot, into the very thickest of the fight;
and, when we did open, masters, every broadside told with fearful
effect. I never saw a man issue his commands with more coolness or
self-possession.
"There are none of our continental neighbours who make better seamen, or
who fight more doggedly, than the Dutch. We were in a blaze of flame for
four hours. Our rigging was slashed to pieces; and two of our ports were
actually knocked into one. There was one fierce, ill-natured Dutchman,
in particular--a fellow as black as night, without so much as a speck of
paint or gilding about him, save that he had a red lion on the
prow--that fought us as long as he had a spar standing; and, when he
struck at last, fully one-half the crew lay either dead or wounded on
the decks, and all his scupper-holes were running blood as freely as
ever they had done water at a deck-washing. The Bedford suffered nearly
as severely. It is not in the heat of action that we can reckon on the
loss we sustain. I saw my comrades falling around me--falling by the
terrible cannon-shot, as they came crashing in through our sides; I
felt, too, that our gun wrought more heavily as our numbers were
thinning around it; and, at times, when some sweeping chain-shot or
fatal splinter laid open before me those horrible mysteries of the inner
man which nature so sedulously conceals, I was conscious of a momentary
feeling of dread and horror. But, in the prevailing mood, an unthinking
anger, a dire thirsting after revenge, a dogged, unyielding firmness,
were the chief ingredients. I strained every muscle and sinew; and amid
the smoke, and the thunder, and the frightful carnage, fired and loaded,
and fired and loaded, and with every discharge sent out, as it were, the
bitterness of my whole soul against the enemy. But very different were
my feelings when victory declared in our favour, and, exhausted and
unstrung, I looked abroad among the dead. As I crossed the deck, my feet
literally splashed in blood; and I saw the mangled fragments of human
bodies sticking in horrid patches to the sides and beams above. There
was a fine little boy aboard, with whom I was an especial favourite. He
had been engaged, before the action, in the construction of a toy ship,
which he intended sending to his mother; and I used sometimes to assist
him, and to lend him a few simple tools; and, just as we were bearing
down on the enemy, he had come running up to me with a knife, which he
had borrowed from me a short time before.
"'Alick, Alick,' he said, 'I have brought you your knife; we are going
into action, you know, and I may be killed, and then you would loose
it.'
"Poor little fellow! The first body I recognised was his Both his arms
had been fearfully shattered by a cannon-shot, and the surgeon's
tourniquets, which had been fastened below the shoulders, were still
there; but he had expired ere the amputating knife had been applied. As
I stood beside the body--little in love with war, masters--a comrade
came up to me to say that my friend and countryman, Donald Gair, lay
mortally wounded in the cockpit. I went instantly down to him. But never
shall I forget, though never may I attempt to describe, what I witnessed
that day, in that frightful scene of death and suffering. Donald lay in
a low hammock, raised not a foot over the deck; and there was no one
beside him, for the surgeons had seen at a glance the hopelessness of
his case, and were busied about others of whom they had hope. He lay on
his back, breathing very hard, but perfectly insensible; and in the
middle of his forehead there was a round, little hole, without so much
as a speck of blood about it, where a musket bullet had passed through
the brain. He continued to breathe for about two hours; and, when he
expired, I wrapped the body decently up in a hammock, and saw it
committed to the deep. The years passed; and, after looking death in the
face in many a storm and many a battle, peace was proclaimed, and I
returned to my friends and my country.
"A few weeks after my arrival, an elderly Highland woman, who had
travelled all the way from the further side of Loch Shin to see me, came
to our door. She was the mother of Donald Gair, and had taken her
melancholy journey to hear from me all she might regarding the last
moments and death of her son. She had no English, and I had not Gaelic
enough to converse with her; but my mother, who had received her with a
sympathy all the deeper from the thought that her own son might have
been now in Donald's place, served as our interpreter. She was strangely
inquisitive, though the little she heard served only to increase her
grief; and you may believe it was not much I could find heart to tell
her; for what was there in the circumstances of my comrade's death to
afford pleasure to his mother? And so I waived her questions regarding
his wound and his burial as I best could.
"'Ah,' said the poor woman to my mother, 'he need not be afraid to tell
me all. I know too, too well that my Donald's body was thrown into the
sea; I knew of it long ere it happened; and I have long tried to
reconcile my mind to it--tried when he was a boy even; and so you need
not be afraid to tell me now.'
"'And how,' asked my mother, whose curiosity was excited, 'could you
have thought of it so early?'
"'I lived,' rejoined the woman, 'at the time of Donald's birth, in a
lonely shieling among the Sutherland hills--a full day's journey from
the nearest church. It was a long, weary road, over muirs and mosses. It
was in the winter season, too, when the days are short; and so, in
bringing Donald to be baptised, we had to remain a night by the way, in
the house of a friend. We there found an old woman of so peculiar an
appearance, that, when she asked me for the child, I at first declined
giving it, fearing she was mad, and might do it harm. The people of the
house, however, assured me she was incapable of hurting it; and so I
placed it on her lap. She took it up in her arms, and began to sing to
it; but it was such a song as none of us had ever heard before.'
"'Poor little stranger!' she said, 'thou hast come into the world in an
evil time. The mists are on the hills, gloomy and dark, and the rain
lies chill on the heather; and thou, poor little thing! hast a long
journey through the sharp, biting winds, and thou art helpless and cold.
Oh! but thy long after-journey is as dreary and dark. A wanderer shalt
thou be over the land and the ocean; and in the ocean shalt thou lie at
last. Poor little thing! I have waited for thee long. I saw thee in thy
wanderings, and in thy shroud, ere thy mother brought thee to the door;
and the sounds of the sea, and of the deadly guns, are still ringing in
my ears. Go, poor little thing! to thy mother--bitterly shall she yet
weep for thee--and no wonder; but no one shall ever weep over thy grave,
or mark where thou liest amid the deep green, with the shark and the
seal.'
"'From that evening,' continued the mother of my friend, 'I have tried
to reconcile my mind to what was to happen Donald. But, oh! the fond,
foolish heart! I loved him more than any of his brothers, because I was
to lose him soon; and though, when he left me, I took farewell of him
for ever, for I knew I was never--never to see him more, I felt, till
the news reached me of his fall in battle, as if he were living in his
coffin. But, oh, do tell me all you know of his death. I am old and
weak, but I have travelled far, far to see you, that I might hear all;
and surely, for the regard you bore to Donald, you will not suffer me to
return as I came.'
"But I need not dwell longer on the story. I imparted to the poor woman
all the circumstances of her son's death, as I have done to you; and,
shocking as they may seem, I found that she felt rather relieved than
otherwise."
"This is not quite the country of the second sight," said my friend; "it
is too much on the borders of the Lowlands. The gift seems restricted to
the Highlands alone, and it is now fast wearing out even there."
"And weel it is," said one of the men, "that it should be sae. It is
surely a miserable thing to ken o' coming evil, if we just merely ken
that it is coming, an' that come it must, do what we may. Hae ye ever
heard the story o' the kelpie that wons in the Conan?"
My friend replied in the negative.
THE STORY OF THE DOOMED RIDER.