substance: " I was upon the outlook lying upon
my breast, and looking over the top of the
rocks, when I saw a creature like a woman
sitting upon a stone. She seemed to have
something like a white sheet, or grave-clothes
wrapped around her. Sometimes she combed
her hair, and sometimes she tossed her arms
in the air. All her ways were fearsome, and
at last she rushed into the sea, and vanished
beneath the waves. My heart lap (leapt), I
grew blind, and I remember nothing more
until I awoke with all my bones sore, and the
men lifting me up." The medical theory of
his illness, as expounded by his doctor, was,
that he had gone out with incipient fever
upon him, had fallen asleep in an exposed
situation, and the hallucinations of delirium
had done all the rest. My informant who
remembered him well, maintained he had
been unwittingly the Actæon of a bathing
Diana at a time when ladies rarely bathed in
Scotland, and had been punished by the
vengeance of the goddess. Probably,
however, an accumulation of foam among the
stones of the beach had taken the flickering
form of a woman. The white scum would
seem to rise up amidst the black stones, and
Andrew Brands was frightened by a mermaid
because he had never been taught the effects
of perspective. Was it in some such way as
this that Cytherea herself was seen by the
poetic eyes of a fisherman of Cyprus, issuing
from the froth of the sea until she
was wafted in a shell to the shore by
Zephyrus, where the Graces received and
adorned her for presentation to the celestials
of Olympus?

Extraordinary physical phenomena generally
precede extraordinary catastrophes.
Everybody has heard of the warning blue
lights. During the night which preceded a
storm, in which seven men of a seaside
village were lost, an aged man, I have been
assured, saw seven blue lights passing in
solemn procession from the roofs of their
cottages towards their grave-yard. He
entreated the men to stay at home, and not to
go to sea. But they were obstinate, and
went. He told some old and some young
people, who would listen to him, what he
had seen, and had scarcely finished his vaticination
when the lightning leaped high into
the sky, the thunder pealed, and a hurricane
lashed the sea into furious madness. The
boats were not far from the shore, but before
they could reach it a boat capsized, and seven
men were lost within sight of their families.
A week afterwards, at the very hour of the
day corresponding to the hour of the night of
the procession of the blue lights, the funeral
procession of the seven fishermen was seen
going from their cottages by the very way the
lights had gone; and beneath the very spots
where the lights stood in the churchyard the
corpses rested for evermore. The law of the
elders in these villages is, that no boats ought
to go to sea when the old men say they have
seen the blue lights. The blue lights are
possibly electrical facts. The traditions
respecting their direction are as variable as
the winds. The guess is not a very hazardous
one, that science would agree with the old
men in warning the fishers against going to
sea when the air was charged with electricity
after midnight, in the coldest hours of the
twenty-four.

When the Footdee fishers were found in
the last century to be no more scrupulous
than other people respecting custom-house
oaths, an oath was framed for them, founded
upon their superstitious fears, which proved
to be far more effectual than the ordinary
one. It concluded with these words: " If I
do not speak the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth, may my boat be a
bonnet to me."

Of course the fishers leaned to the side of
the smugglers against the excise and customs
officers. Almost everybody did, in the last
century except the lawyers, something of a
legal education being necessary to see the
propriety of establishing what Adam Smith,
while himself a Commissioner of the Board
of Customs, denounced as the outposts of
Pandemonium. When examined before the
courts in smuggling cases, the fishermen
contrived occasionally, under an appearance
of simplicity, to baffle with considerable
cunning the cross-examinations of the counsel
for the Crown. Public sympathy was, in
those days on the side of the smugglers, who
called themselves free-traders, a designation
which has since attained universal honour.
The principle of obedience to law, the sine
quâ non of civilisation, is less easily enthroned
upon uneducated consciences than the
principle of buying cheap and selling dear.
Lairds, merchants, and workmen, therefore,
all admired the cool duplicity with which
the fishers sometimes evaded the truth when
under cross-examinations. Some of them
were once witnesses in a case of deforcement.
The counsel for the prosecution asked a
fisherman,— "While the men were struggling
in the water, did you not hear the prisoner
call out, ' Drown the dogs? '"

"We saw nae dogs there, sir," was the
demure and composed reply.

"I do not ask you what you saw; but, on
your oath, did you not hear him call out,
' Drown the dogs ? '"

"There was nae ony dogs there, sir," was
again the obstinate answer.

Although no man of distinction in science
or letters has ever arisen in any of these
villages, it cannot be doubted they have
produced many men whom Poodle or Doodle
might have safely trusted upon his legs on
the floor of the House of Commons to answer
the questions of honourable and independent
members.

A century ago the fishers, who were hardy,
industrious, decorous, and honest, were nevertheless
inveterate swearers— a fault which I