Such are some of the stories laboriously gathered together and set down in perfect good faith by Theophilus Insulanus. It will be seen that they are loosely reported, are always at second or third hand, and that, if the original teller of the stories could be placed in the witness-box, a strict cross-examination would make sad havoc with him and them. But although sufficiently ridiculous and foolish in themselves, they exemplify the strange ghostly atmosphere which pervades the western islands. Every one of the people amongst whom I now live believes in apparitions and the second sight. Mr M'Ian has seen a ghost himself, but he will not willingly speak about it. A woman gifted with the second sight dwells in one of the smoking turf huts on the shore. At night, round a precipitous rock that overhangs the sea, about a hundred yards from the house, a light was often seen to glide, and evil was apprehended. For years the patient light abode there. At last a boy, the son of one of the cotters, climbing about the rock, missed his footing, fell into the sea and was drowned, and from that hour the light was never more visible. At a ford up amongst the hills, the people tell me doleful cries have been heard at intervals for years. The stream has waited long for its victim, but I am assured that it will get it at last. That a man will yet be drowned there is an article of faith amongst the cotters. But who? I suspect _I_ am regarded as the likely person. Perhaps the withered crone down in the turf hut yonder knows the features of the doomed man. This prevailing superstitious feeling takes curious possession of one somehow. You cannot live in a ghostly atmosphere without being more or less affected by it. Lying a-bed you don't like to hear the furniture of your bedroom creak. At sunset you are suspicious of the prodigious shadow that stalks alongside of you across the gold-green fields. You become more than usually impressed by the multitudinous and unknown voices of the night. Gradually you get the idea that you and nature are alien; and it is in that feeling of alienation that superstition lives. [Sidenote: Father M'Crimmon's story.]