Mr Kirk informs us that these spiritual people live in fair well-lighted houses, where all the usual affairs of human life go on in an immaterial fashion. ‘Women are yet alive who tell that they were taken away to nurse fairy children,’ an image of themselves being left in their place. ‘When the child is weaned, the nurse dies, or is conveyed back, or gets it to her choice to stay there.’ One woman thus carried away returned after two years, was taken in by her husband, and had some children afterwards. In speech and apparel, the fairy folk resemble those under whose country they live; they ‘wear plaids and variegated garments in the Highlands, and suanochs in Ireland.’ Second-sighted men can invoke them at pleasure, but in general do not relish the sight of them, on account of the hideous spectacles they present, and their sullen and dismal looks. ‘They [the spirits] are said to have many pleasant toyish books,’ producing in them fits of corybantic jollity, ‘as if ravished by a new spirit entering them.’ Other books they have of abstruse science, but no Bibles.
Men of the second-sight do not necessarily discover strange things when requested; only by fits and starts, ‘as if inspired with some genius at that instant, which before did lurk in or about them.’ Mr Kirk knew one whose neighbours often observed him disappear at a certain place, and some time after reappear at another, a hostile encounter with the spiritual people being the cause of his disappearance. These seers know what will happen to their friends, by means of the spirits with whom they have intercourse.
1673.
The people are said by Mr Kirk to believe that the souls of their ancestors dwell in the fairy hills, of which one was placed conveniently to each church-yard. He relates that, about the year 1676, ‘when there was some scarcity of grain, two women living at a distance from each other dreamed about a treasure hid in a certain fairy hillock. ‘The appearance of a treasure was first represented to the fancy, and then an audible voice named the place where it was to their waking senses. Whereupon both rose, and meeting accidentally at the place, discovered their design; and jointly digging, found a vessel as large as a Scottish peck, full of small pieces of good money, of ancient coin; which halving between them, they sold for dish-fulls of meal to the country people.’
Dr Grahame, the modern pastor of Aberfoyle, gives us[240] the traditionary account of the cessation of Mr Kirk’s life, in high keeping with the style of the mystic world which he endeavoured to expound. It is stated that, as Mr Kirk was one evening walking in his night-gown upon one of the fairy mounts above described in the vicinity of his manse, he sunk down in what seemed to be a fit of apoplexy, which the unenlightened took for death, while the more understanding knew it to be a swoon produced by the supernatural influence of the people whose precincts he had violated. After the ceremony of a seeming funeral, the form of Mr Kirk appeared to a relation, and commanded him to go to Graham of Duchray, who was the cousin of both, and tell him: ‘I am not dead, but a captive in Fairyland, and only one chance remains for my liberation. At the baptism of my posthumous child, I will appear in the room, when, if Duchray shall throw over my head the knife or durk which he holds in his hand, I may be restored to society; but if this opportunity is neglected, I am lost for ever.’ Duchray was apprised of what was to be done. The ceremony took place, and the apparition of Mr Kirk was seen while they were seated at table; but Duchray, in his astonishment, failed to perform the ceremony enjoined; consequently, Mr Kirk was left to ‘drie his weird’ in Fairyland.
Dec. 22.
The death of the Rev. John Burnet, minister of Kilbride, is noted as arising from an extraordinary cause, though the immediate disease was jaundice. He ‘had a son lately dead before him, and seeing his son dissected, and the physicians finding fault with his noble [vital] parts, [the father] presently apprehends a faultiness in his own, which apprehension stuck with him even to his death, which physicians took to be the cause of his sickness; so strong is the power of apprehension.’—Law.
1673.
Died this year, by a fall from a horse, at Tangier in Morocco, John Earl of Middleton, governor of that establishment. Of a family of the minor gentry in Kincardineshire, he had entered life as a pikeman in Hepburn’s regiment in France, but soon was called to take part in the civil wars of his own country, serving first the English parliament and Scottish Estates, and afterwards proving an active and vigorous partisan of the king. His preferment after the Restoration as commissioner to the Scottish parliament, and his magnificent but drunken administration, with all the ills that flowed from it, are part of our national history. He is said by a contemporary to have been a man of ‘heroic aspect,’ of ‘manly eloquence,’ ‘happier in his wit than in his friends;’ of ‘natural courage and generosity;’ ‘more pitied in his fall than envied in his prosperity.’[241] Though disgraced, the king could not entirely desert one who had risked and done so much for him in his worst days; so he appointed him governor of Tangier—a civil kind of banishment, in which, we see, he died.