IV. The evils which men dread, and the appearances which they cannot understand, are invariably appropriated by superstition: if her power extend not over the terrible and the mysterious, she is without power at all. And not only does she claim whatever is inexplicable in the great world, but also in some cases what seems mysterious in the little; some, for instance, of the more paradoxical phenomena of human nature. It has been represented to me as a mysterious, unaccountable fact, that persons who have been rescued from drowning regard their deliverers ever after with a dislike which borders almost on enmity. I have heard it affirmed, too, that when the crew of some boat or vessel have perished, with the exception of one individual, the relatives of the deceased invariably regard that one with a deep, irrepressible hatred; and in both cases the feelings described are said to originate in some occult and supernatural cause. Alas! neither envy nor ingratitude lie out of our ordinary everyday walk. There occurs to me a little anecdote illustrative of this kind of apotheosis of the envious principle. Some fifty years ago there was a Cromarty boat wrecked on the rough shores of Eathie. All the crew perished with the exception of one fisherman; and the poor man was so persecuted by the relatives of the drowned, who even threatened his life, that he was compelled, much against his inclination, to remove to Nairn. There, however, only a few years after, he was wrecked a second time, and, as in the first instance, proved the sole survivor of the crew. And so he was again subjected to a persecution similar to the one he had already endured; and compelled to quit Nairn as he had before quitted Cromarty. And in both cases the relatives of the deceased were deemed as entirely under the influence of a mysterious, irresistible impulse, which acted upon their minds from without, as the Orestes of the dramatist when pursued by the Furies.