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

SECOND-SIGHT. 125
she expressed herself in timid, tremulous terms, and
said, that while seated on the wooden bench by the fire,
she happened to cast her eyes upon a plank on the op-
posite side, and beheld stretched on it the mangled,
bleeding- body of a lad, Macdonald, then alive and well.
Having told this, she solicited the minister not to di-
vulge it. On his leaving the Seer, he was instantly
pounced upon by the landlady, and asked, in breathless
anxiety, " What did she see? What or whom did she
see?" His reverence had no alternative but to tell the
good matron, for the comfort of herself and her domestic
circle, what the dreaded woman had revealed. All par-
ties were then contented, and the affair looked on as a
mere revery. Six weeks or so thereafter, there was a
marriage in the upper district of the parish, to which
the young man, Macdonald, was invited, and went.
On returning home alone about midnight by a hilly
pathway, in the extreme darkness he lost his way, fell
over a precipice about a thousand feet high, and was
dashed to pieces in the clefts of the debris below. He
was eventually missed at home. Messengers were sent
in quest of him, hither and thither, and when no tid-
ings could be found concerning him. the population of
the district went forth in hundreds on the search.
After a day or two's minute ransacking of every hill
and dale, lake and river, the mangled corpse was dis-
covered by a boy, jammed hard and fast in a crevice at
the base of the huge precipice already named. The
crowd assembled around the shattered remains, and a
cry was uttered as to what was best to be done? The
torn body could hardly be handled, and a proposal was
immediately agreed to, that four men should run to the