A little case of the heart comes in as a pendant to the above narrative. Four days after the end of the term assigned in the act of the Privy Council, James Baynes, wright, came before that august body with a petition, setting forth how ‘one Monsieur Devoe, servant to the mountebank who was lately in this place, hath, by sinistrous and indirect means, secured and enticed the petitioner’s daughter and only child to desert her parents, and to live with him upon pretence of a clandestine marriage.’ There being reason to fear that he might escape, unless very prompt measures were taken, the Council granted warrant to have the offender imprisoned in the Tolbooth. After escaping from these matrimonial troubles, Devoe settled in Edinburgh as a dancing-master, and we shall find his name coming before us several times on other occasions.
Feb.
The deaf and dumb Laird of Duntreath, a noted person in those days, being at Paisley, ‘made signs to some of great fightings and troubles to be in the land in a few months.’—Law.
This gentleman, who was said to be, notwithstanding his deficiencies, of a very devout frame of mind, had in the preceding December made a more special divination. ‘There was one of his acquaintance went forth to a water at a good distance frae him upon the ice, and had fallen in; and he, at that instant of time, gave warning of it by a sign.’ On another occasion, when the Dumb Laird was sitting in his own house at Duntreath, ‘two of his neighbours falling out at two miles’ distance from him, the one striking the other with a whinger in the arm, he, in the same instant of time, makes a sign of it.’
It was a general belief that many persons born deaf and dumb possessed this supposed gift of clairvoyance or second-sight. One, attended by another man, coming to the Boat of Balloch, at the foot of Loch Lomond, and seeing a salmon-net drawing in, signed that there were five fish in it, and one of them with a hook in its mouth, indicating the hook by crooking his finger and putting it in his cheek. ‘The other man, being curious to know the truth of it, causes reckon the fishes, and see if any of them had a hook; and it was found so as it was signed by the dumb man. He tells the fishers what the dumb man had signed, and they gave the dumb man one of them.’—Law.
1677.
At Colzium House, the seat of Sir Archibald Edmondstone of Duntreath, there is a portrait of his predecessor, the Deaf and Dumb Laird, presenting an aspect of intelligence much beyond what could have been anticipated regarding one subject to so great an infirmity. It is a tradition in the family that, in early life, finding himself much overlooked on account of his inability to communicate, and being in particular left at home when the rest went to church, he was found one day, on the family returning from worship, sitting among the horses in the stable. When his mother let him know that this conduct excited surprise, he imparted to her by such means as were at his command, that, seeing himself treated as if he were something less than a human being, he had thought it only right and proper that he should place himself in the society of the animals which had the same deficiency as himself. The reproach was felt, and he was thenceforth treated more on a footing of equality, and allowed to go to church with the rest of the family.
June.