Ceremonies of a more fantastic character were sometimes involved, and round the novice’s body was coiled a hair rope with which a corpse had been bound to its bier. He was then required to look through a hole left by the removal of a fir knot; and, on stooping, he was instructed to look back between his legs, until an advancing funeral procession should cross the boundary of the estates of two different owners. The inconvenience of this complicated performance is obvious; it might also be dangerous; for if the wind changed while the novice was girded with the mystical cord, he was liable to the penalty of death. A seer gifted with this wonderful faculty could not divest himself of it, though often he would fain have done so. However acquired, it was a perilous endowment, fraught with physical and mental suffering, and reputed to be no gift from on high, but to have come from the Father of Evil. The objects seen were generally sad and sorrowful; calamities to persons or nations. Woodrow says that before the Marquis of Argyll went to London in 1660, he was playing “at the bullets,” or bowls, with some Scottish gentlemen; when one of them, as the Marquis stooped down to lift the bullet, “fell pale,” and said to those about him: “Bless me, what is this I see? my lord with his head off, and all his shoulder full of blood?” On one occasion, a gentleman joined a company, all of whom were very frank and cheerful. He had no sooner entered than one of the guests, who had not previously known him, showed much depression of spirit. Without taking any notice of it the new-comer quickly rose, and went his way. The other thereupon showed great concern, and wished he would remain; for he saw him, he said, with a shroud up to his neck, and he knew that this sign foreboded his death. In vain some of the company would have persuaded the doomed man to take warning, but he departed, and having ridden a short distance, he and his horse fell, and he broke his neck. On the morning of the battle of Bothwell Bridge, that sore defeat to the Covenanters--so vigorously described by Scott in his “Old Mortality”--Mr. John Cameron, minister at Lochhead in Kintyre, fell into a fit of melancholy, so that Mr. Morison, of his elders, observing him through his chamber door, sore weeping and wringing his hands, knocked until he opened to him. Then he asked what was the matter? Were his wife and children well? “Little matter for them,” he answered; “our friends at Bothwell are gone.” Mr. Morison told him it might be a mistake, and the offcome of his gloomy thoughts: “No, no,” said he, “I see them flying as clearly as I see the wall.” As near as they could calculate by the accounts they afterwards obtained, this incident at the Lochhead of Kintyre was contemporaneous with the flight of the Covenanters at Bothwell.