Some years ago, the author was fishing in a river of Inverness-
shire. He drove to the stream, picked up an old gillie named
Campbell, and then went on towards the spot where he meant to begin
angling. A sheep that lay on the road jumped up suddenly, almost
under the horse's feet, the horse shied, and knocked the dogcart
against a wall. On the homeward way we observed a house burning,
opposite the place where the horse shied, and found that a farmer
had been evicted, and his cottage set on fire. This unhappy person,
it seems, was in debt to all his tradesmen, not to his landlord
only. The fire-raising, however, was an excessively barbaric method
of getting him to leave the parish, and the view justified the
indignation of the gillie. The old gillie, much excited, declared
that the horse had foreseen this event in the morning, and had,
consequently, shied. In a more sceptical spirit the author reminded
Campbell of the sheep which started up. 'That sheep was the devil,'
Campbell explained, nor could this rational belief of his be shaken.
The affair led to a conversation on the second sight, and Campbell
said, 'he had it not,' 'but his sister (or sister-in-law) had it'.
Campbell was a very agreeable companion, interested in old events,
and a sympathiser, as he said, in spite of his name, with the great
Montrose. His remarks led the author to infer that, contrary to
what some inquirers wrote in the last, and Graham Dalyell in the
present century, the belief in the second sight is still quite
common in the Highlands. As will be shown later, this inference was
correct.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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