The Argosy — page 263: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

246 The Shapes that Dreams may take. q century afterwards, when two Highlanders were arraigned for the murder of an English soldier in a wild and solitary mountain district known as “the Spital of Glenshee.” In the course of the “ proof — for the Crown,” to use the phrase of Scottish law, another High- lander, one Alexander McPherson, deposed that on one night an apparition appeared to come to his bedside, and announced itself as the murdered soldier, Davies, and described the precise spot where his bones would be found, requesting McPherson to search for and bury them. He fulfilled but the first part of the behest, where- upon the dream or apparition came back, repeated it, and called its murderers by their names. It appears that, with the strangely stern common-sense which in Scotland exists side by side with the strongest imaginative power, the prisoners were acquitted principally on account of this evidence, whose “ visionary ” nature threw discredit on the whole proceedings. One difficulty lay in the possibility of communication between the murdered man and the dreamer, since the one spoke only English and the other nothing but Gaelic! Years afterwards, however, when, both the accused men were dead, their law agent admitted confi- dentially that he had no doubt of their guilt. | Singularly enough, a story strikingly similar in many of its details found its way before a criminal tribunal in our own century. In the remote and sequestered Highland region of Assynt, Sutherland, a rustic wedding and merry-making came off in the spring of 1830. At this festivity there figured an itinerant pedlar named Murdoch Grant, who from that occasion utterly disappeared. A month afterwards, a farm-servant, passing a lonely mountain lake, observed a dead body in the water, and on its being drawn ashore) the features of the missing pedlar were recognised. He had been robbed, and had met his death by violence. The sheriff of the district, a Mr. Lumsden, investigated the affair. without any result— in his searches being aided by a well-educated young man of the neighbourhood, one Hugh Macleod, ostensibly a schoolmaster, mi then without employment. One day the Sheriff chancing to call at the local post-office Macleod’s name, probably owing to the part he was taking in these investigations, came into the conversation, and the postmastei: casually remarked that he should not have thought Macleod was s¢ well off—he having recently changed a ten pound note at his shop, Mr. Lumsden’s suspicions were aroused by this, and on his asking Macleod a few questions on the matter, he proved the young man t¢ be untruthful. Therefore he put him under arrest, and caused his home to be searched. But none of the pedlar’s property being found there, and no other suspicious circumstance transpiring, ht was about to be released, when a tailor named Kenneth Fraser cam forward with the following extraordinary story. | In his sleep he declared that the Macleods’ cottage was presales COMN|MELDOOKS Heol iin)