_Mac-a-Chreachaire_, a native of Barra, was a celebrated shoulder-blade reader in his day. According to popular tradition he was present at the festivities held on the occasion of the castle at _Bàgh Chiòsamul_ (the seat of the MacNeills, then chiefs of the island) being finished. A shoulder-blade was handed to him, and he was pressed again and again to divine from it the fate of the castle. He was very reluctant, but at last, on being promised that no harm would be done him, he said the castle would become a cairn for thrushes (_càrn dhruideachun_), and this would happen when the Rattle stone (_Clach-a-Ghlagain_) was found, when people worked at sea-weed in _Baile na Creige_ (Rock-town, a village far from the sea), and when deer swam across from Uist, and were to be found on every dung-hill in Barra. All this has happened, and the castle is now in ruins. Others say the omens were the arrival of a ship with blue wool, a blind man coming ashore unaided, and that when a ground officer with big fingers (_maor na miar mòra_) came, Barra would be measured with an iron string. A ship laden with blue cloth was wrecked on the island, and a blind man miraculously escaped; every finger of the ground officer proved to be as big as a bottle (!), and Barra was surveyed and sold. When Murdoch the Short (_Murchadh Gearr_), heir to the Lordship of Lochbuy in the Island of Mull, circ. A.D. 1400, was sent in his childhood for protection from the ambitious designs of his uncle, the Laird of Dowart, to Ireland, he remained there till eighteen years of age. In the meantime his sister (or half-sister) became widowed, and, dependant on the charity and hospitality of others, wandered about the Ross of Mull from house to house with her family. It was always “in the prophecy” (_san tairgneachd_) that Murdoch would return. One evening, in a house to which his sister came, a wedder sheep was killed. After the meal was over, her oldest boy asked the farmer for the shoulder-blade. He examined it intently for some time in silence, and then, exclaiming that Murdoch was on the soil of Mull (_air grunnd Mhuile_), rushed out of the house and made for Lochbuy, to find his uncle in possession of his rightful inheritance. On the night of the massacre of Glencoe, a party of the ill-fated clansmen were poring over the shoulder-blade of an animal slain for the hospitable entertainment of the soldiers. One of them said, “There is a shedding of blood in the glen” (_tha dòrtadh fuil sa ghleann_). Another said there was only the stream at the end of the house between them and it. The whole party rushed to the door, and were among the few that escaped the butchery of that dreadful night. It is a common story that a shoulder-blade seer once saved the lives of a company, of whom he himself was one, who had ‘lifted’ a cattle spoil (_creach_), by divining that there was only the stream at the end of the house between them and their pursuers.