Contemporary with Aubrey was the Rev. Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle, a Celtic scholar who translated the Bible into Gaelic.  In 1691 he finished his Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Faunes and Fairies, whereof only a fragment has reached us.  It has been maintained that the book was printed in 1691, but no mortal eye has seen a copy.  In 1815 Sir Walter Scott printed a hundred copies from a manuscript in the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh.  He did not put his name on the book, but Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, in a note on his own copy, affirms that Sir Walter was the editor. {235} Another edition was edited, for Mr. Nutt, by the present writer, in 1893.  In the year following the completion of his book Mr. Kirk died, or, as local tradition avers, was carried away to fairyland.

Mr. Kirk has none of the Presbyterian abhorrence of fairies and fauns, though, like the accusers of the Orkney witches, he believes that ‘phairie control’ inspires the second-sighted men, who see them eat at funerals.  The seers were wont to observe doubles of living people, and these doubles are explained as ‘co-walkers’ from the fairy world.  This ‘co-walker’ ’wes also often seen of old to enter a hous, by which the people knew that the person of that liknes wes to visite them within a few days’.

Now this belief is probably founded on actual hallucinatory experience, of which we may give a modern example.  In the early spring of 1890, a lady, known to the author, saw the ’copy, echo, or living picture,’ of a stranger, who intended (unknown to her) to visit her house, but who did not carry out his intention.  The author can vouch for her perfect integrity, and freedom both from superstition, and from illusions, except in this case.  Miss H. lives in Edinburgh, and takes in young men as boarders.  At the time of this event, she had four such inmates.  Two, as she believed, were in their study on the second floor; two were in the drawing-room on the first floor, where she herself was sitting.  The hour was seven o’clock in the evening, and the lamp on the stair was lit.  Miss H. left the drawing-room, and went into a cupboard on the landing, immediately above the lamp.  She saw a young gentleman, of fair complexion, in a suit of dark blue, coming down the staircase from the second floor.  Supposing him to be a friend of her boarders whose study was on that floor, she came out of the cupboard, closed the door to let him pass, and made him a slight bow.  She did not hear him go out, nor did the maid who was standing near the street door.  She did not see her two friends of the upstairs study till nine o’clock:  they had been at a lecture.  When they met, she said:  ‘Did you take your friend with you?’

‘What friend?’

‘The fair young man who left your rooms at seven.’

‘We were out before seven, we don’t know whom you mean.’

The mystery of the young man, who could not have entered the house without ringing, was unsolved.  Next day a lady living exactly opposite Miss H.’s house, asked that lady if she could give hospitality to a young man who was coming to Edinburgh from the country.  Miss H. assented, and prepared a room, but the visitor, she was informed, went to stay with a relation of his own.  Two days later Miss H. was looking out of her dining-room window after luncheon.