Witches are still in active practice.  There was an old woman very miserly.  She would alway be taking one of her neighbours’ sheep from the hills, and they stood it for long; they did not like to meddle with her.  At last it grew so bad that they brought her before the sheriff, and she got eighteen months in prison.  When she came out she was very angry, and set about making an image of the woman whose sheep she had taken.  When the image was made she burned it and put the ashes in a burn.  And it is a very curious thing, but the woman she made it on fell into a decline, and took to her bed.

The witch and her family went to America.  They kept a little inn, in a country place, and people who slept in it did not come out again.  They were discovered, and the eldest son was hanged; he confessed that he had committed nineteen murders before he left Scotland.

“They were not a nice family.”

“The father was a very respectable old man.”

The boatman gave me the name of this wicked household, but it is perhaps better forgotten.

The extraordinary thing is that this appears to be the Highland introduction to, or part first of, a gloomy and sanguinary story of a murder hole—­an inn of assassins in a lonely district of the United States, which Mr. Louis Stevenson heard in his travels there, and told to me some years ago.  The details have escaped my memory, but, as Mr. Stevenson narrated them, they rivalled De Quincey’s awful story of Williams’s murders in the Ratcliffe Highway.

Life must still be haunted in Badenoch, as it was on Ida’s hill, by forms of unearthly beauty, the goddess or the ghost yet wooing the shepherd; indeed, the boatman told me many stories of living superstition and terrors of the night; but why should I exhaust his wallet?  To be sure, it seemed very full of tales; these offered here may be but the legends which came first to his hand.  The boatman is not himself a believer in the fairy world, or not more than all sensible men ought to be.  The supernatural is too pleasant a thing for us to discard in an earnest, scientific manner like Mr. Kipling’s Aurelian McGubben.  Perhaps I am more superstitious than the boatman, and the yarns I swopped with him about ghosts I have met would seem even more mendacious to possessors of pocket microscopes and of the modern spirit.  But I would rather have one banshee story than fifteen pages of proof that “life, which began as a cell, with a c, is to end as a sell, with an s.”  It should be added that the boatman has given his consent to the printing of his yarns.  On being offered a moiety of the profits, he observed that he had no objection to these, but that he entirely declined to be responsible for any share of the expenses.  Would that all authors were as sagacious, for then the amateur novelist and the minor poet would vex us no more.