It should be explained that the sin-relinquishing superstition--a superstition probably pre-Celtic, perhaps of the remotest antiquity--hardly exists to-day, or, if at all, in its crudest guise. The last time I heard of it, even in a modified form, was not in the west, but in a remote part of the Aberdeenshire highlands. Then, it was salt, not bread, that was put on the breast of the dead: and the salt was thrown away, nor was any wayfarer called upon to perform this or any other function. THE SIN-EATER SIN. _Taste this bread, this substance: tell me_ _Is it bread or flesh?_ [_The Senses approach._] THE SMELL. _Its smell_ _Is the smell of bread._ SIN. _Touch, come. Why tremble?_ _Say what’s this thou touchest?_ THE TOUCH. _Bread._ SIN. _Sight, declare what thou discernest_ _In this object._ THE SIGHT. _Bread alone._ CALDERON, _Los Encantos de la Culpa._ A wet wind out of the south mazed and mooned through the sea-mist that hung over the Ross. In all the bays and creeks was a continuous weary lapping of water. There was no other sound anywhere. Thus was it at daybreak: it was thus at noon: thus was it now in the darkening of the day. A confused thrusting and falling of sounds through the silence betokened the hour of the setting. Curlews wailed in the mist: on the seething limpet-covered rocks the skuas and terns screamed, or uttered hoarse, rasping cries. Ever and again the prolonged note of the oyster-catcher shrilled against the air, as an echo flying blindly along a blank wall of cliff. Out of weedy places, wherein the tide sobbed with long, gurgling moans, came at intervals the barking of a seal. Inland, by the hamlet of Contullich, there is a reedy tarn called the Loch-a-chaoruinn.[5] By the shores of this mournful water a man moved. It was a slow, weary walk that of the man Neil Ross. He had come from Duninch, thirty miles to the eastward, and had not rested foot, nor eaten, nor had word of man or woman, since his going west an hour after dawn. [5] _Contullich_: _i.e._ Ceann-nan-tulaich, “the end of the hillocks.” _Loch-a-chaoruinn_ means the loch of the rowan-trees. At the bend of the loch nearest the clachan he came upon an old woman carrying peat. To his reiterated question as to where he was, and if the tarn were Feur-Lochan above Fionnaphort that is on the strait of Iona on the west side of the Ross of Mull, she did not at first make any answer. The rain trickled down her withered brown face, over which the thin grey locks hung limply. It was only in the deep-set eyes that the flame of life still glimmered, though that dimly. The man had used the English when first he spoke, but as though mechanically. Supposing that he had not been understood, he repeated his question in the Gaelic.