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 Farquharson, a neighbour and friend, the witness did as he was bid; and when they were without the cottage, the appearance told the witness he was the ghost of Sergeant Davis, and requested him to go and bury his mortal remains, which lay concealed in a place he pointed out in a moorland tract called the Hill of Christie.  He desired him to take Farquharson with him as an assistant.  Next day the witness went to the place specified, and there found the bones of a human body much decayed.  The witness did not at that time bury the bones so found, in consequence of which negligence the sergeant’s ghost again appeared to him, upbraiding him with his breach of promise.  On this occasion the witness asked the ghost who were the murderers, and received for answer that he had been slain by the prisoners at the bar.  The witness, after this second visitation, called the assistance of Farquharson, and buried the body.

Farquharson was brought in evidence to prove that the preceding witness, MacPherson, had called him to the burial of the bones, and told him the same story which he repeated in court.  Isabel MacHardie, a person who slept in one of the beds which run along the wall in an ordinary Highland hut, declared that upon the night when MacPherson said he saw the ghost, she saw a naked man enter the house and go towards MacPherson’s bed.

Yet though the supernatural incident was thus fortified, and although there were other strong presumptions against the prisoners, the story of the apparition threw an air of ridicule on the whole evidence for the prosecution.  It was followed up by the counsel for the prisoners asking, in the cross-examination of MacPherson, “What language did the ghost speak in?” The witness, who was himself ignorant of English, replied, “As good Gaelic as I ever heard in Lochaber.”  “Pretty well for the ghost of an English sergeant,” answered the counsel.  The inference was rather smart and plausible than sound, for, the apparition of the ghost being admitted, we know too little of the other world to judge whether all languages may not be alike familiar to those who belonged to it.  It imposed, however, on the jury, who found the accused parties not guilty, although their counsel and solicitor and most of the court were satisfied of their having committed the murder.  In this case the interference of the ghost seems to have rather impeded the vengeance which it was doubtless the murdered sergeant’s desire to obtain.  Yet there may be various modes of explaining this mysterious story, of which the following conjecture may pass for one.