Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 6 1888.djvu/254

246 practice, being sent for from place to place, but seems rather feared than loved. Water in which one of these stones is boiled cures the effect of the evil eye. They are hereditary in her family.

A man, also our tenant, cures pains in persons at a distance by magic. The patients send him their names sealed up; he requires no diagnosis, but from the moment he receives the paper the pain or fever begins to mend. This was tried by a girl weeding in the garden here last autumn, but without success. I must say that the failure did not shake her faith, at which, as she had been for half a year one of my pupils in a Bible-class, I was not a little scandalised.

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I remember an old woman, now dead, who never went an hour from home without making one of her neighbours open the Bible and see what the first verse said. If the verse was to her mind, she then said, "I will go in God's name." The Book of Psalms is the one most used for this purpose. She was very superstitious, assembled the whole kirk session of elders once to hear of a revelation she had from heaven, and frequently told us that she "seed the Mischief sitting up in a tree, and girning at her." She prayed a great deal, but was so cross as to be almost mad, or, as her neighbours said, "very thro' other at the full of the moon."

If a young woman wished to know who is to be her husband, let her read the third chapter of Ruth, and put the Bible under her head at night on Hallow-e'en. The intended will appear to her in a dream.—(Peggy Monro, Achlach.)

CHAPTER IX.

ANIMALS AND CHIMERAS.

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A loch on this estate, now small and muddy, but once much larger, at the time when it received its name from the following sad event:—A dozen lads were playing by its banks, riding and chasing the