The tale was not at first hand.
Mr. Frazer, in his tractate, first deals with the question of fact,
of the hallucinations called second sight: 'That such
representations are made to the eyes of men and women, is to me out
of all doubt, and that affects follow answerable thereto, as little
questionable'. But many doubt as to the question of fact,
'wherefore so little has been written about it'. Four or five
instances, he thinks, will suffice, 1. A servant of his left a barn
where he slept, 'because nightly he had seen a dead corps in his
winding sheet, straighted beside him'. In about half a year a young
man died _and was buried_ in the barn. 2. Mr. Frazer went to stay
in Mull with Sir William Sacheverell, who wrote on second sight in
the Isle of Man, and was then engaged in trying to recover treasures
from the vessel of the Armada sunk in Tobermory Bay. The Duke of
Argyll has a cannon taken from Francis I. at Pavia, which was raised
from this vessel, and, lately, the fluke of a ship's anchor brought
up a doubloon. But the treasure still lies in Tobermory Bay. Mr.
Frazer's tale merely is that a woman told a sailor to bid him leave
a certain boy behind. The sailor did not give the message, the boy
died, and the woman said that she had seen the lad 'walking with me
in his winding sheets, sewed up from top to toe,' that this portent
never deceived her. 3. A funeral was seen by Duncan Campbell, in
Kintyre, he soon found himself at the real funeral.
4. John Macdonald saw a sea-captain all wet, who was drowned,
'about a year thereafter'. The seer 'was none of the strictest
life'. 5. A man in Eigg foretold an invasion and calamities. The
vision was fulfilled by a landing of English forces in 1689, when
Mr. Frazer himself was a prisoner of Captain Pottinger's, in Eigg.
He next mentions an old woman who, in a syncope or catalepsy,
believed she had been in heaven. She had a charm of barbarous
words, whereby she could see the answers to questions 'in live
images before her eyes, or upon the wall, but the images were not
tractable (tangible), which she found by putting to her hand, but
could find nothing'. In place of burning this poor crone, Mr.
Frazer reasoned with her, 'taught her the danger and vanity of her
practice,' and saw her die peacefully in extreme old age.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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