Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 6 1888.djvu/179

Rh down to rest under a tree, having drank of a little stream that ran below them. The wearied man soon fell asleep, and his companion sat watching the larks singing above the furze-bushes, and the dimpling and purling of the burn. He heard his fellow-traveller groaning and muttering in a restless sleep, and he soon after saw creep out of his mouth an insect like a bee, only wanting its wings. This bee crawled along the man's clothes, and down on the sod, till it came to the brook, which it could neither fly over nor swim. It aye turned back and back, and aye tried it again, till the waking man, letting it creep on his sword, helped it across. It then went on two hundred yards, or more, and disappeared in a small cairn. Presently the sleeper came to himself, and told his friend that he had had a strange dream: a "wee, wee crayterie, no bigger nor a bee," had told him of a hidden treasure, and had promised to show it to him. It had seemed to him as if the creature came out of his mouth, had crossed the burn by his comrade's help, and had gone out of sight in a cairn. The watcher (who had had time to follow the bee to the cairn just hid by a rising ground, and not more than two hundred yards off) laughed at the story, but the elder man said that it must be true, and declared his mind to seek the cairn and its contents. High words followed, and the younger, drawing his sword, slew the man who had dreamt the dream of gold. The victim with his last breath upbraided the other with treachery, and took the tree, under which he had slept and now lay, to witness that he had been foully murdered. The murderer dug out the cairn and found the treasure, gold and silver and silver armour-pieces, and became a gay, rich man, but "aye where he went men saw a tree abune him and behind him, aye walking where he walked, and staying where he stayed. An' for all his gear he never got a friend to bide wi' him, nor a lass to marry him. At last he was over weary of it all, and went to the priest, and telled him the way of it, and made a restitution to the dead man's folk, and that was good to him whatever: but he did na live lang syne."—(Rev. W. Forsyth, Dornoch.)

xix.—.

Once upon a time two men went salmon-fishing in the Shin, and