It is on this night that those Scottish mummers, the Guisars, to whom we have already more than once alluded, still go about the streets, habited in antic dresses, having their faces covered with vizards and carrying cudgels in their hands. The doggerel lines repeated by these masquers, as given by Mr. Callender, in a paper contributed by him to the Transactions of the Antiquarian Society of Scotland, are as follows:-- "Hogmanay, Trollolay, Gie me o' your white bread, I'll hae nane o' your grey;" and much learning has been exhausted, and ingenuity exercised in their explanation. The admirable paper of Mr. Repp, in the same Transactions (to which we have already alluded, and which we recommend to the notice of our antiquarian readers), connects them, as we have before hinted, with another superstition common to many of the northern nations; and which may be compared with one of the articles of popular belief before described, as prevailing in England, on Christmas Eve; that, viz., which seems to imply that the spirits of evil are at this time in peculiar activity, unless kept down by holier and more powerful influences. According to this able investigator, the moment of midnight, on New Year's Eve, was considered to be a general removing term for the races of genii, whether good or bad; and the first two lines of the cry in question, which as he explains them, after the Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic dialects, were words of appeal to the good genii (the hoghmen or hillmen), and of execration against the evil ones (the trolles), were so used, in consequence of such belief (that these different spirits were, at that hour, in motion), and of the further one that the words of men had power to determine that motion to their own advantage. It is well known that, in some countries, and we may mention Germany, great importance is attached to words involuntarily uttered at certain seasons, and under certain circumstances, and they are supposed to be either words of betrayal, leaving the speaker open to the machinations of evil spirits, who may apply them in a strained and fatal sense, if at all ambiguous; or words of power, controlling the designs of demons, and compelling them to work out the good of the utterer, against their will. Now a superstition of this kind, Mr. Repp says, attaches _generally_ to the doctrines of demonology; and he states that he could prove his position by many instances from Arabic and Persian fairy lore. We may observe that some of the Highland superstitions mentioned by Mr. Stewart, such as that of sprinkling the household with water drawn from _the dead and living ford_, and that of fumigating the apartments and half smothering their tenants with the smoke from burning piles of the juniper-bush (both considered to operate as charms against the spells of witchcraft and the malignity of evil eyes), have, evidently, their origin in that same belief, that the powers of evil are on the wing at