Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/441

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There was sometimes much time spent at funerals in some of the islands, one of the reasons being that after the funeral procession arrived at the churchyard considerable time was spent at the open grave before one was found courageous enough to begin to fill in the grave, as it was believed that either the first one who did so, or some one of his relatives would be the next whose grave would have to be filled in.

The people of Lewis had in olden times a curious method of detecting murder, as the following legend shows. It is related of a boat's crew from Bragar that, while fishing with the hand-line, one of their number hauled into the boat a human bone. This was looked upon by all present as a sure omen that one of the crew must be a murderer. To ascertain the guilty person, as was the custom, each one present had to go through the ordeal of deliberately handling the bone, and to pass it along to his next neighbour. No sooner had the culprit taken it into his hand than it spurted blood into his face. The murderer, of course, was at once detected. He confessed his crime, and told that he had murdered such and such a person, at such and such a time and place, and then thrown the body into a lake, mentioning the lake, which is about two miles from the sea. They seem to have had a firm belief in this mode of detecting murder. Blood thus spurted could never be wiped out.

When a person was found dead on the island of Lewis, and no clue to the cause of his death could be obtained, according to an unwritten law all the people of the surrounding districts were obliged to come to the place where the dead was found, and there, in the presence of trustworthy witnesses, each had to go through the ordeal of touching the corpse with his ungloved hand. The body, it was believed, would then squirt blood into the murderer's face. One can easily imagine how naturally a murderer who had any faith in this superstition would betray himself by the cautious, timid manner in which he would attempt to go through the ordeal. My own impression is that this method of detecting murder