10 TRANSACTIONS. 
foot-falls had been most frequently heard. A young man who had 
been attending classes in Edinburgh came home, and one evening 
when I was in his father’s house set off a balloon after sunset. The 
candle in it set the whole tissue on fire whiie it was soaring above 
our heads. A shepherd whom I knew, seeing the light from a 
distance, rushed in a state of great agitation into a neighbouring 
cottage, which he happened to be near, and brought out the good- 
man of the house. Both thought that it must have been che Light 
which is seen before death; but the mistress of the house rather 
soothed them by remarking that such a light could not be seen by 
two at once. An old woman informed me that she had witnessed 
this premonitory light, which lighted up the interior of the byre 
while she was engaged milking her cows, and she learned that her 
mother, residing sume miles distant, had expired that same even- 
ing. Readers will recollect the fateful light in Sir Walter Scott’s 
ballad of lovely Rosabelle. James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, 
refers to an omen called the “death bell,” a tingling in the ears, 
which is believed to announce a friend’s death. As the “light 
before death ” could not be seen by two at once, so the death-bell 
could only be heard by one at the same time. The relations of a 
gentleman residing in Tynron have been warned of death by the 
sound of wheels upon the gravel walk leading to the door, when 
no wheels were there, and to a family in Durisdeer the warning 
came like a switch against the panes of the window. The old 
precentor of Glencairn, who died six or seven years ago, told me 
that while walking one moonlit evening in his garden in a medi- 
tative mood he heard a sound, as if a cart containing pieces of 
metal had been tilted up and the materials discharged. His belief 
was that a murdered infant had been buried in that garden. 
These murdered innocents were frequently heard wailing about 
forty years ago in the corn and in the thickets around Maqueston 
in Tynron. A gentleman of suspected morality had occupied this 
house early in the century. So troublesome were these sounds 
that the new tenant had for a while great difficulty in retaining 
servants. A white lady has been observed hovering by moonlight 
over the little cascade in the Shinnel which forms Paul’s Pool. In 
“ Bennett’s Tales of Nithsdale” mention is made of the custom of 
placing a wooden platter with salt, or more correctly salt and 
earth—for a turf was cut and put above the platter—on the breast 
of a corpse. There is a reminiscence of this in our parish, and the 
reason given for the custom was that it prevented the corpse from 
