as is not very surprising, the visitation was again repeated.  On the third night she appeared with a sorrowful and displeased countenance, upbraided him with want of love and affection, and conjured him, for the last time, to attend to her instructions, which, if he now neglected, she would never have power to visit earth or communicate with him again.  In order to convince him there was no delusion, he “saw in his dream” that she took up the nursling at whose birth she had died, and gave it suck; she spilled also a drop or two of her milk on the poor man’s bed-clothes, as if to assure him of the reality of the vision.

The next morning the terrified widower carried a statement of his perplexity to Mr. Matthew Reid, the clergyman.  This reverend person, besides being an excellent divine in other respects, was at the same time a man of sagacity, who understood the human passions.  He did not attempt to combat the reality of the vision which had thrown his parishioner into this tribulation, but he contended it could be only an illusion of the devil.  He explained to the widower that no created being could have the right or power to imprison or detain the soul of a Christian—­conjured him not to believe that his wife was otherwise disposed of than according to God’s pleasure—­assured him that Protestant doctrine utterly denies the existence of any middle state in the world to come—­and explained to him that he, as a clergyman of the Church of Scotland, neither could nor dared authorize opening graves or using the intervention of prayer to sanction rites of a suspicious character.  The poor man, confounded and perplexed by various feelings, asked his pastor what he should do.  “I will give you my best advice,” said the clergyman.  “Get your new bride’s consent to be married to-morrow, or to-day, if you can; I will take it on me to dispense with the rest of the banns, or proclaim them three times in one day.  You will have a new wife, and, if you think of the former, it will be only as of one from whom death has separated you, and for whom you may have thoughts of affection and sorrow, but as a saint in Heaven, and not as a prisoner in Elfland.”  The advice was taken, and the perplexed widower had no more visitations from his former spouse.

An instance, perhaps the latest which has been made public, of communication with the Restless People—­(a more proper epithet than that of Daoine Shi, or Men of Peace, as they are called in Gaelic)—­came under Pennant’s notice so late as during that observant traveller’s tour in 1769.  Being perhaps the latest news from the invisible commonwealth, we give the tourist’s own words.