Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/625

Rh were thrown violently to the ground by the rush of the spirits. They were able to show the marks of their rough treatment. The death of a person known to all of them followed hard upon this vision.

(4) A number of girls were sitting round the lire in a "black" house (a house made of walls without cement and generally with the hearth in the middle of the floor) when one of them said suddenly that something was going to happen, for she had heard a strange cry outside. The others heard nothing. Shortly afterwards a sudden death took place in a house near by.

This girl's power showed itself in another direction, for she used to see a wedding ring on the finger of a girl who had no thoughts of a young man at the time, but who inevitably married in a short time after.

(5) A tinker wife came to a farmhouse asking for shelter for a night. This is quite a usual thing, and she was sent to an outhouse and given straw for a bed. In the morning, being rested and fed, she came to thank the master and mistress. But on her face was an expression of sadness and fear. Being questioned as to the cause, she very reluctantly said that she had had a vision of the eldest son of the house being brought home dead, laid on one of the planks composing her sleeping-place of the previous night. "That will never be," said the farmer; and he ordered the outhouse to be pulled down and the planks sawn up for firewood. Having seen this done to his entire satisfaction he went out cheerfully, accompanied by the youth of the tinker's vision. But "there is no armour against fate," and the youth was accidentally shot. In the ensuing bustle some of the farm servants brought planks to carry the body home, and one of these was a plank from that very outhouse which had been overlooked in the sawing up.

(6) An old man, who died some years ago, had many visions of people who were doomed. He generally saw nothing of the face, but he was aware by the colour of the clothes or some other distinguishing mark to whom the vision referred. He was almost invariably right, though on one occasion his fears drove him into making a mistake, for, his wife being seriously ill, he imagined that his vision was a warning of her death. Even in