Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/243

Rh when the row was over: 'There's my dream now. The porter in this case interpreted his dream on the general principle that a fire portends mischief.

When the indications are particularly clear, what is to happen is foretold with some confidence, but there may be a long interval before fulfilment. Twelve months have elapsed since the occurrence of the "warning" in the following story, but no result has yet been noted:

"An old man saw a boy with a dog and a lamb in the churchyard as it was getting late. About the same time another person saw the same boy with the dog and the lamb going round a mill-dam which is not far from the churchyard. When this became known in the place, people began to think that some boy was to be drowned in the dam, and that he would be buried in the churchyard. As if in confirmation of this, the figure of a man has been seen since then going about the dam at night with a lantern in his hand, as if searching for the body of the boy who is to be drowned."

One curious story has come in my way which points clearly to the belief that the loss of power of a part of the body is accompanied by the appearance of more or less light. It is from a native of Bernera. "A man was in the habit of going on ceilidh (paying an evening visit) to a certain house, and every night he went he saw something, but would not tell what it was. One night another man who had also been on ceilidh at the same house, went home with him. When they reached the place where he (the first-mentioned) used to see something, the man who was along with him saw fire coming out of one of his hands, and it was with difficulty he got him home from that, he having become so stiff. After that night the whole of that side got powerless. The man, who became paralysed, never told what he had seen previous to his seizure."

Another instance of a man, as it were, carrying his own death-warning is the following: