On this passage there is an interesting note very apropos to our subject:—“Among other omens to which faithful credit is given among the Scottish peasantry is what is called the ‘dead-bell,’ explained by my friend James Hogg to be that tinkling in the ears which the country people regard as the secret intelligence of some friend’s decease.” He tells a story to the purpose in the “Mountain Bard,” p. 26—
“O lady, ’tis dark, an’ I heard the dead-bell,
An’ I darena gae younder for gowd nor fee.”
“By the dead-bell,” says Hogg, “is meant a tinkling in the ears, which our peasantry in the country regard as a secret intelligence of some friend’s decease. Thus this natural occurrence strikes many with superstitious awe. This reminds me of a trifling anecdote which I will relate as an instance. Our two servant girls agreed to go an errand of their own one night after supper, to a considerable distance, from which I strove to persuade them, but could not prevail. So, after going to the apartment in which I slept, I took a drinking-glass, and coming close to the back of the door, made two or three sweeps round the lips of the glass with my fingers, which caused a loud, shrill sound. I then overheard the following dialogue:—B.—“Ah, mercy! the dead-bell went through my head just now with such a knell as I never heard.” C.—“I heard it too.” B.—“Did you indeed? That is remarkable. I never knew of two hearing it at the same time before.” C.—“We will not go to Midgehope to-night.” B.—“No! I wouldn’t go for all the world! I warrant it is my poor brother, Wat; who knows what these wild Irishes may have done to him?” Tinkling, however, which both Scott and Hogg use, is not the word. It is more of a ringing, so clear and loud at times, that we once heard a little girl say “there was a bell in her head.” Our authorities above confess that it is called the “dead-bell” amongst the peasantry, and by bell they mean not a tinkling but a loud and very pronounced sound, as if of solid metal striking hollow metal, and causing the bell-sound with which we are all so familiar. Mickle, in his fine ballad Cumnor Hall, has a reference to the same superstition:—
“The death-bell thrice was heard to ring,
An aerial voice was heard to call,
And thrice the raven flapp’d its wing
Around the towers of Cumnor Hall.”
To sneer at such beliefs, and pooh-pooh them superciliously and from a philosophical stand-point, is easy; it has been tried with but little satisfactory result. The true philosopher will be more and more disposed, the more he deals with such matters, and the closer he examines them, to fall back on Hamlet’s dictum, “That there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” So ineradicable is superstition of this sort, that you may battle with it long enough—we have battled with it for years—and find it at last by no means the weaker of your assaults, no matter how cautiously and circuitously you select to deal with it.
After an unusually mild and open season, we have just had a taste of downright winter in the bitterly cold gales and drifting snow-storms of the last few days. Our weatherwise old folks are of course delighted that winter in proper dress and form has come at long last; better late than never, is the cry, and a bright and warm spring in due course is confidently predicted.