attendants, who were huddled together round the door of the house, assuring them that if they abstained from evil amusements the devil would not molest them any more.
On another occasion it was reported, that, while hide-and-seek was going on at a lykewake, some young men took the dead body out of the coffin, and laid one of their number in its place to hide. Search being made for the youth, he was discovered in the coffin quite dead, but the corpse they had come to watch could nowhere be found. It was believed in the neighbourhood that it had been carried off by the fairies, and that the young man had been slain by the evil spirit.
A paper in Richardson’s Local Historian’s Table Book (vol. iii. p. 66) confirms and illustrates this account of a lykewake on the Borders. It adds a few particulars, the shrouding of the looking-glass, to intimate that all vanity, all care for earthly beauty, are over with the deceased, and the stopping and shrouding of the clock, to show that with him time is over; and it painfully evinces that the solemnity of the occasion did not preclude practical jokes, which appear to us profane and sacrilegious in the highest degree.
Some traces of these Scottish rites may be found in widely-separated parts of our island. I have seen the plate of salt on the breast of the dead in the North of England, and heard of its use in the Isle of Man, as well as in Wales, Hertfordshire, and Somersetshire. Probably its use has been very general, and this as an emblem of incorruption and eternity.
Sir Walter Scott considered that the word “sleete” in the chorus of the lykewake dirge was a corruption of “selt” or “salt:”
This ae night, this ae night,
Every night and all,
Fire and sleete and candlelighte,
And Christe receive thy sawle.
The custom of opening the door at the time of death is also widespread. I have heard of it as far south as Spain, and also in Germany. My readers cannot forget how, at the smuggler’s
