leaving the town—Darlington, I believe—he saw a person emerge from a lane and walk behind him at the distance of five or six paces. He stopped, so did the other. He walked on, and the double did the like, still keeping at the same distance as before. He came to a very lonely part of the road, the double joined him, and soon a whisper was distinctly heard from the hedge as of a man speaking to a companion. ‘It’s nae use, there’s twa o’ them.’ The double continued with the farmer till the road became open and then disappeared. But for this intervention the latter would have been robbed, perhaps even murdered.”
But to return to the omens in the Wilkie MS. Some of them are more or less remarked in every part of our island—such as the death-watch, the croaking raven, or the solitary magpie; nor is it matter of astonishment that when the mind is impressed by the awe of sickness and impending death in our household we are prone to notice and brood over sounds and sights which seem to connect themselves with our anxieties and sorrows. The howling of dogs is a widely-known death omen. We find it in every part of our island, in France and Germany, and even in Constantinople. A close observer, who has seen the omen given, and noted its fulfilment, describes the dog as very uneasy till it can get under the death-chamber. If the house stands within an inclosure, and it cannot get in, it will run round the premises, or pace up and down before them. If it succeeds in forcing an entry, it will stop under the window, howl horribly, finish with three tremendous barks, and hurry away. Mr. Kelly, who relates this,[1] adds that the dog is an attendant on the dead in the German as in the Aryan mythology, that dogs see ghosts, and that when Hela, the goddess of death, walks abroad, invisible to human eyes, she is seen by the dogs. Again, in the North of England the flight of jackdaws or swallows down the chimney is held to presage death, as well as the appearance of a trio of butterflies flying together. So does a winding-sheet, or piece of curled tallow in the candle, called in Scotland a “dead spale.” Three raps given by no human hand are said also to give warn-
- ↑ Indo-European Tradition and Folk-Lore, p. 110.
