A young fellow who had received a liberal education, in fact, a probationer of the Church, the son of a self-made man, fairly well-to-do, avowed his own belief in the Evil Eye. He said in effect: “As sure as you and I are sitting here there is an Evil Eye in it. I know that when I was in Harris, and our M. an infant, there was a certain woman who used to come in pretty often, the sister-in-law of H., you know, and my wife, who you know is not one to tell a lie or speak about these things, told me that every time that woman came in she would be praising the child, and the child was always unwell after it.” We thus see, though we know that ministers of the Church are by their profession kept in the dark on matters of which they would express unbelief, yet that where a superstition is ingrained in a parishioner it is not concealed from the minister. Ministers may be misled by putting their own interpretation on the form in which the information comes to them. A clergyman in one of the Western Islands said: “I have observed that there is still a strong belief in blighting from the Evil Eye among the people in the parish of K. A respectable and intelligent man whom I visited often during a season of sickness, once and again, when talking about his illness, made the remark ‘_fhuair mi cronachadh_.’ I always misunderstood what the man meant by _cronachadh_, taking it in the sense of reproof, and therefore thinking that what was meant was that the sufferer was placed under chastisement by a dispensation of Providence. At last, however, I learned from a third person that the sick man was strongly impressed with the belief that his illness was caused by some evil-intentioned person who had wished him ill.” This suggests witchcraft as much as or even more than the Evil Eye; but the two things run into each other more or less. We have already seen one Gaelic reciter maintaining that witchcraft, _buidseachas_, did not now exist, but the Evil Eye did. Compare that with this from a native of Uist:—