‘Why, there’s my ghost!’ she exclaimed, and her friends, running to the window, allowed that he answered to the description.  The ‘ghost’ went into the house of Miss H.’s friend on the other side of the street, and Miss H., with natural curiosity, sallied out, and asked who he was.  He was the young man for whom she had prepared a room.  During his absence in the country, his ‘co-walker’ had visited the house at which he intended to stay!

Coincidences of this kind, then, gave rise to the belief in this branch of second sight.

Though fairies are the ‘phantasmogenetic agencies’ in second sight, a man may acquire the art by magic.  A hair rope which has bound a corpse to a bier is wound about him, and then he looks backward ‘through his legs’ till he sees a funeral.  The vision of a seer can be communicated to any one who puts his left foot under the wizard’s right foot.

This is still practised in some parts of the Highlands, as we shall see, but, near Inverness, the custom only survives in the memory of some old people. {237} Mr. Kirk’s wizards defended the lawfulness of their clairvoyance by the example of Elisha seeing Gehazi at a distance. {238} The second sight was hereditary in some families:  this is no longer thought to be the case.  Kirk gives some examples of clairvoyance, and prescience:  he then quotes and criticises Lord Tarbatt’s letters to Robert Boyle.  Second sight ’is a trouble to most of them, and they would be rid of it at any rate, if they could’.  One of our own informants says that the modern seers are anxious when they feel the vision beginning:  they do not, however, regard the power as unholy or disreputable.  Another informant mentions a belief that children born between midnight and one o’clock will be second-sighted.  People attempt to hasten or delay the birth, so as to avoid the witching hour; clearly then they regard the second sight as an unenviable accomplishment.  ’It is certane’ says Kirk, ’he sie more fatall and fearfull things, than he do gladsome.’  For the physical condition of the seer, Kirk describes it as ‘a rapture, transport, and sort of death’.  Our contemporary informants deny that, in their experience, any kind of convulsion or fit accompanies the visions, as in Scott’s account of Allan Macaulay, in the Legend of Montrose.

Strangely unlike Mr. Kirk, in style and mode of thought, is his contemporary, the Rev. Mr. Frazer of Tiree and Coll; Dean of the Isles.  We cannot call a clergyman superstitious because, 200 years ago, he believed in good and bad angels.  Save for this element in his creed, Mr. Frazer may be called strictly and unexpectedly scientific.  He was born in Mull in 1647, being the son of the Rev. Farquhard Frazer, a cadet of the house of Lovat.  The father was one of the first Masters of Arts who ever held the living of Coll and Tiree:  in his time only three landed gentlemen of the McLeans could read and write.  The son, John, was educated at Glasgow