Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 6 1888.djvu/248

240 contractor and master mason it was impossible for him to get up to the mill that day. Next day, however, he went to the bye-wake, and started painfully on going into the room to see poor Munro's mangled body, rolled in fair linen cloths, and lying under the window, to the right of the fire, in the same spot where the dead man had seen the warning repose.

X. was the only person to whom the miller had told the vision (which he had concealed from his wife), and he has never forgotten the fate of his poor friend.—(Graham.)

iv.—

Some workmen, trenching by the side of a river in Sutherland long, long ago, heard, one day, an unearthly voice cry: "The hour is come, but not the man." Half-an-hour later they descried a man running at full speed, as if with the intention of crossing the stream. One of them started off to try and intercept him, because the river was then in "speat," or "spate," and he was very likely, from his haste, to plunge in without noticing how heavily it was running. The man, a stranger, seemed eager and breathless, and, indeed, what is called "fey," for he refused to listen to the workmen, and shook them off. They, familiar with the pools and shallows of the river, used force to prevent his running so great a risk; and finding he would not listen to reason, they carried him off, and locked him up in our Lady's Chapel, not far off. Thither they returned to seek him, when work hours were over, and, to their horror, found that he had drowned himself in the font. The "man" could not pass his "hour."—(Dell.)

v.—

Farther on there is a hill covered with birch and oak copse, through which the high-road to Bonar Bridge also passes. One morning, in winter, and in deep snow, a man, proceeding slowly westward, saw ahead of him another man in a long hooded cloak of blue homespun. He recognised him, though the figure had its back to him, to be the father of one of our small tenants, a man of the name of Murray. Eager to overtake him, the traveller quickened his pace, but it was not