and song, no doubt, contributed to the enjoyment
of their merry meetings ; but the music
was confined to a fiddle, and their collection
of songs scarcely extended beyond The Praise
of Paul Jones, The Waefu' Ballad of Captain
Glen, and the Christmas carol of By Southend.
As for the women— toiling, as they
were, incessantly— they had no time for
mental improvement. But as they grew old
they gained practical knowledge and experience.
Many of them had a knowledge of
simple remedies for curing diseases, which
obtained for their prescriptions a preference
to those of medical men. Some of them were
supposed to be invested with supernatural
powers, which made it dangerous to offend
them.

I may interpose here a general remark.
The superstitions which were sweepingly
condemned by the philosophy of the eighteenth
century as falsehood and imposture, the
philosophy of the nineteenth finds to be true in
a sense. Instead of rejecting it in a heap,
the student of the present day shakes and
washes the rubbish, and separates the grains
of truth from it. What, I may be asked,
was it true that old fish-crones possessed
the powers of witchcraft ? I have not a
doubt of it. The word witchcraft comes
from wiccian, whence witchery, wickedness.
It means evil influence. Gifted with the
power of reading characters and actions, of
seeing consequences and calculating results,
and capable of imparting a bias, laying a
snare, adapting a temptation, planning a
vengeance, or instilling a physical or moral
poison; and years give all these powers to
malignant intelligence.

Anything may be twisted into stupid
or incredible shapes. When affairs did not
prosper among the Footdee folk, it was
attributed to an evil foot, an " ill fit." Prior to
setting out upon any expedition or enterprise,
they were careful and particular about
the first " fit" they met in the morning. The
Scum of the Well was an object of rivalry
every New Year's Day morning, Old Style.
As the midnight hour approached, and the
last moments of the year came on, the women
assembled in a solemn group, around the
large old draw-well, and scolded and scuffled
to decide whose pan or bucket should carry
off the first fraught (or first freight). The
superstition of the first foot may afford some
explanation of the phrase Putting his foot
into it. Prior to commencing anything, is it
not well to note carefully who may be taking
the initiative for evil in it? Is not the first
evil foot astir in it a serious thing for any
enterprise ? As for the scum of the well,
is not the energetic housewife who obtains
the first supply of the first necessary of
life,— water — likely to surpass all rivals
in providing for her household? I opine
it is only a sort of piety due to our
forefathers to guess they were shrewder
fellows than we might suppose from our
views of their superstition, witchcraft, and
sorcery.

Indeed there is something small in the
minds which study superstitions only to find
in them occasions for indulging the sudden
elation of self-glory which Hobbes says is
the cause of laughter. Our forefathers
inherited a spirit-world of personifications; and
we have inherited a mass of philosophical
abstractions. Our forefathers inherited a
poetical and popular nomenclature, and we
express our scientific generalisations in crack-
jaw words of Greek and Latin derivation.
Ghosts, wraiths, witches, fairies, mermaids
and water-kelpies, are personifications which
have been covered with ridicule, and
undoubtedly there have been an abundance
of ridiculous stories told respecting them;
but I suspect there is philosophy in them
after all. The minds of Coast Folk are
peopled from early childhood with spectres
belonging to the land, sea, and sky; and no
wonder, since, during long centuries,
catastrophes have desolated the homes of Coast
Folk which have issued mysteriously and
terribly from land, sea, and sky. Seven miles
from Aberdeen there is a fishing-village which
was buried in a sand-storm in one night.
Almost every soul of the inhabitants was
smothered in the sand-drift, and for many
years the spire of the village church alone
marked the spot in the hollow treacherous
sand-hills. When a boy I was warned by
words and looks of horror from approaching
the fatal locality where it was thought the
wrath of the Almighty had displayed itself
so awfully. Several instances have occurred
in which all the men of a village have gone
to sea, and perished in one night. A boat or
a corpse heard of as having been cast ashore
on a distant beach, was sometimes the only
tidings ever heard of them. Mermaids have
frightened many a brave man; and, in several
of the monthly magazines published in the
last century their existence was as seriously
discussed as apparitions of sea-serpents have
been in our own day. Andrew Brands saw
one. " I recollect Andrew perfectly well. He
was a stout man, with a broad good-humoured
face, and dark hair, who wore his bonnet
upon the back of his head." Occasionally
employed as a boatman or pilot, he looked
more like a jolly sailor than a sleepy fisherman.
One summer day Andrew was found
lying insensible on the hill of Torry which
faces the sea upon the side of the river Dee,
opposite to Footdee. When roused, he spoke
confusedly and incoherently. He was thought
to be deranged. He was carried to the ferry
and rowed home. After several weeks of
delirious fever he became low and melancholy,
and declined to give any account of his
illness. Under medical treatment he
recovered, although reduced to a skeleton. The
fearful belief spread through the village that
Andrew Brands had seen something. When
questioned after his recovery, he said in