wife in Lothian, who, after being carried off by the fairies, reappeared repeatedly on Sunday to her children, and combed their hair. On one of these occasions the husband met her, and was told that there was one way to recover her, namely, by lying in wait on Hallowe'en for the procession of fairies, and stepping boldly out, and seizing her as she passed among them. At the moment of execution, however, his heart failed, and he lost his wife for ever. In connection with this, Scott refers to a real event which happened at the town of North Berwick. A widower, who was paying addresses with a view to second marriage, was troubled by dreams of his former wife, to whom he had been tenderly attached. One morning he declared to the minister that she had appeared to him the previous night, stating that she was a captive in Fairyland, and begged him to attempt her deliverance. The mode she prescribed was to bring the minister and certain others to her grave at midnight to dig up her body, and recite certain prayers, after which the corpse would become animated and flee from him. It was to be pursued by the swiftest runner in the parish, and if he could catch it before it had encircled the church thrice, the rest were to come to his help and hold it notwithstanding its struggles, and the shapes into which it might be transformed. In this way she would be redeemed. The minister, however, declined to take part in so absurd and indecent a proceeding.[1]
Absurd and indecent it would undoubtedly have been to unearth a dead body in the expectation of any such result; but it would have been entirely in harmony with current superstition. The stories and beliefs examined in the present chapter prove that there has been no superstition too gross, or too cruel, to survive into the midst of the civilization of the nineteenth century; and the exhumation of a corpse, of the two, is less barbarous than
- ↑ Napier, p. 41; Lord A. Campbell, "Waifs and Strays," p. 71; "Border Minstrelsy," vol. ii. p. 173.
