This is perhaps the most widely known and most popular story in the Highlands. Its incidents can be reproduced on a winter evening with frightful distinctness by means of a shadow on the wall. This gives it a wonderful attraction for children, and if fear can under any circumstances be called into healthy action (and dread, like any other power or capacity of the mind must have a proper and healthy action), it is in listening to this or similar stories. Their baneful effects, if such there be, soon disappear. There is hardly an old church in the Highlands, where the event has not been said to have occurred. A writer in the last statistical account (Argyleshire, p. 682 note) claims it for the old church of Glassary. In Skye it is placed in the _Eaglais Uamhalta_ in Conasta near Duntulm. The old church of Beauly has the most popular claim, though to a youthful audience the truth of the story is much confirmed by putting the scene in some place that they know. In the cathedral of Iona, there is a small nook pointed out, called “the tailor’s hole” (_Toll an taìllear_), where it is said the monks kept the tailor who made their clothes. They kept him too long, and too busy at his work, and at last “things” began to trouble him at night. The worst of these was a fleshless hand that used to show itself on the wall, and say, “a great grey paw that is without meat, tailor.” Another form of the tale is that the tailor was at the _aire chlaidh_, _i.e._ watching the graveyard, of a friend, in a chapel (_caibeal_) when the foodless figure began to emerge from a tomb. The tailor did not run away till the figure had got up as far as the knees, and said: “_Sliasaid liath reamhar_,” etc. EWEN AND THE CARLIN WIFE. One of the commonest of Gaelic sayings is, “Whether he would or not, as the old wife came upon Ewen,” to which is frequently added, “a wife as big as his mother” (_a dheòin no dh’aindeoin, mar thainig a chailleach air Eoghan, bean cho mòr ri mhathair_). There are various versions of the origin of this tale, but none of them common.