“After the ceremony was owre, I slippit awa’ doun into the kitchen again amang the lave o’ the servants, to see if the denner was a’ richt. But in a maument’s time, our maister cam’ into the kitchen, an’ says—‘Betty,’ says he. ‘Sir,’ says I. ‘Betty,’ says he, ‘ye maun consider that ye’re nae langer my servant, but my wife,’ says he, ‘an’ therefore ye must come upstairs an’ sit amang the rest o’ the company,’ says he. ‘Very weel, sir,’ says I. Sae what could I do but gang upstairs to the lave o’ the company, an’ sit doun amang them? Sae, Jean, that was a’ that was about my courtship an’ marriage.”
CHAPTER XIII
HUMOURS OF SCOTTISH SUPERSTITION
It is consistent with the earnestness of the Scottish character that, so long as the light of intelligence was but feebly diffused in the land, there should be a strong tendency towards superstitious imagining in the minds of the people. For superstitious notions, be it noted, have not been wont to spring so much out of listless as out of restless ignorance. Each notion and theory they embrace, however wild and wide of the mark, has been a guess at the truth. In the dim days of the Middle Ages, ere yet the sunshine of science had lit the hilltops of our country, whatsoever came within the living experience of the people, and was not palpable to sense, was readily attributed to supernatural agency, good or bad—generally the latter. Thus it was that the heavens above, and the earth beneath, and even the waters under the earth, became peopled with fairies, brownies, hobgoblins, waterkelpies, warlocks, ghosts, and witches. The powers attributed to these—each monster and spirit in its place—afforded to the popular mind an explanation of what, in the circumstances, was otherwise inexplainable, and thus, so long as ignorance abounded, superstition did much more abound. As the world has grown older the people have, happily, grown wiser. The grosser superstitions of Scotland have entirely disappeared. No living mortal outside of Bedlam, nowadays, believes in witches’ cantrips—that ghosts walk the earth—or that fairies dance beneath the dim light of the moon. No; and the stories of faerie machinations, and of warlocks and witches, which our great-grandmothers related, in the light of the “oilie cruizie,” to the wide-mouthed horror and bewilderment of our youthful grandfathers and grandmothers, would excite the youth of the present generation only to laughter. While saying that the grosser superstitions are gone, however, it must be admitted that some of the milder forms of superstitious belief—such as “freits” and omens—still find acceptance among us. “Marry in May, an’ ye’ll rue’t for aye,” says an old “freit”; and an examination of the Registrar’s books, in town and country, will reveal that, comparatively, very few have the temerity yet to defy the ill-favoured prediction. It is an old “freit” that when children are brought to church for baptism, if the females receive sprinkling before the males, the latter will grow up effeminate, and the former will develop beards; and not very long ago I witnessed myself in a city church a rather unseemly scramble by a parent to have his boy brought to the front in preference to a neighbour’s girl. It is not half a dozen years since a friend of mine in the West of Scotland was advised to pass her children through below a donkey’s belly to cure them of whooping-cough. The night howling of a dog is still believed by many to betoken the early demise of some person in the near neighbourhood of that in which it occurs. “Dream o’ the dead and you’ll get news o’ the livin’,” is a prediction one may hear vented almost any day yet. The practice of “first-footing” at New Year time is a remnant of superstition; as is also the practice, still adhered to in country districts, of throwing a “bauchle” at the heels of a bride as she is quitting her father’s and mother’s house. An old rhyme has come down embracing a number of omens, thus—
“West wind to the bairn when gaun for its name,
Rain to the corpse carried to its lang hame;
A bonnie blue sky to welcome the bride
As she gangs to the kirk wi’ the sun on her side.”
And better confidence is inspired in many when the conditions of each case are favourably meted out.
But to get at the broader humours of superstition, we have to go back a hundred years or more, when the broader superstitions were in vogue; when fortune-tellers and dealers in incantations plied a roaring trade—when the devil—not figuratively, but really—went about like a roaring lion seeking whom he might devour; and when—