Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/304

 264 The Powers of Evil in the Outer Hebrides.

and so saying, he lifted up the cock and twisted his neck. And no cock crowed in that house thereafter. . Mrs. A. W. went to visit a sick old woman who was a Protestant. She was alone with her, the relatives being at the other end of the house, and the patient was not sup- posed to be near death. Suddenly the fowls flew down from the roost and rushed wildly about the room, as if pursued by an enemy. Mrs. W. was much alarmed and perplexed ; when she looked again at the sick woman, she was dead.

A tailor in South Boisdale tells a similar story, and is convinced there was no natural explanation. The patient was of course a Protestant.

John M., joiner, Kilpheder, was playing his pipes one winter evening while there was a terrible snowdrift out- side. The cock suddenly came down from his roost and began to crow and to leap up, flapping his wings at the piper. The wife, who herself told the story, told him to stop, as the cock's behaviour foreboded ill. In the lull that followed the shrill notes of the pipe, the group around the turf-fire began to meditate on what mishap had occurred, or was likely to occur, that night in the blinding storm, and thought that perhaps the priest, who had been seen to pass south, might have succumbed to the storm while returning home, when the voice of the priest himself was heard at the door asking for the good man of the house. The priest took John a little apart and told him that his brother Malcolm had been lost in the storm ; being deceived by the drift, he had walked into Loch nan Faoileann, had fallen through the ice and had soon become too numbed to extricate himself. John heard all with surprising com- posure, his mind having been prepared for the worst.

The crofters very much dislike the modern innovation of not being allowed to keep their beasts in the house, and specially resent the exclusion of the cock, who serves to keep out the Powers of Darkness.