J. F. Campbell Collection > Prophecies of the Brahan seer (Coinneach Odhar Fiosaiche)

THE PROPHECIES OP THE BRAHAN SEER. 85
last two years, that he was unable to articulate — or
perhaps, unwilling to make the attempt, on finding
himself the last male of his line. He may be said to
have, prior to this, fairly recovered the use of speech,
for he was able to converse pretty distinctly; but he
was so totally deaf, that all communications were made
to him by signs or in writing. Yet he raised a regi-
ment at the beginning of the great European war ; he
was created a British peer in 1797, as Baron Seaforth
of Kintail ; in 1800 he went out to Barbadoes as Go-
vernor, and afterwards to Demerara and Berbice ; and
in 1808 he was made a Lieutenant-General. These
were singular incidents in the life of a deaf and dumb
man. He married a very amiable and excellent woman,
Mary Proby, the daughter of a dignitary of the Church,
and niece of the first Lord Carysfort, by whom he had
a fine family of four sons and six daughters. When he
considered his own position — deaf, and formerly dumb ;
when he saw his four sons, three of them rising to man's
estate; and when he looked around him, and observed
the peculiar marks set upon the persons of the predicted
four contemporary great Highland lairds, all in strict
accordance with Coinneach's prophecy — he must have
felt ill at ease, unless he was able, with the incredulous
indifference of a man of the world, to spurn the idea
from him as an old wife's superstition.
However, fatal conviction was forced upon him, and
on all those who remembered the family tradition, by
the lamentable events which filled his house with
mourning. One after another his three promising sons
(the fourth died young) were cut off by death. The
last, who was the most distinguished of them all, for