MARRIAGE.
Those gifted with the second sight were sometimes able to tell the appearance of a person’s future wife. They saw her taïsh, or appearance, sitting beside her husband, and this long before the event occurred, or was spoken of. For instance, a seer has been known to remark to a young man, who did not dream of marrying at the time, “I think your wife must belong to a big house, for she has a white apron on,” etc.
The event has proved the vision to be real. The woman was housemaid in a gentleman’s house. Seers also said they saw their own future wives sitting opposite to them at the fireside.
A native of Coll, Hugh, son of Donald the Red (Eoghan MacDhòmhnuill Ruaidh), while serving with his regiment in Africa, said he saw, almost every evening, for a period of five years, glimpses of the woman whom he afterwards married, and whom he never saw in reality till his return from the wars. Wherever he sat, after the day’s march, the figure of a woman came beside him, and sometimes seemed to him to touch him lightly on the shoulders. On each occasion he merely caught a glimpse of her. When he left the army, and was on his way home, he came to the village at Dervaig, in Mull, from the neighbourhood of which the ferry across to Coll lay. He entered by chance a house in the village, and his attention was unexpectedly attracted by the sound of a weaver’s loom at work in the house. On looking up he saw sitting at the loom the identical woman whose figure had for five years haunted him in Africa. He married her.