THE LIVID HAND. 15 



close the cottage door. The night-mist is creeping up 

 from the sea. I have seen that mist, seen it through the 

 eyes of childhood, on the moorland of the Maolbuie, a 

 few miles west of Cromarty ; and no one who has seen 

 it can wonder that a vivid imagination should evoke 

 spectral forms from its twilight imagery. The same 

 power of fantasy which called up the ghost of old John 

 Feddes, to stand upon the top of the stair, revealed to 

 the eye of the boy, as he peered into the mist on that 

 melancholy evening, a dissevered hand and arm. There 

 is one little circumstance which renders it matter of 

 demonstration that his mind was preoccupied by expect- 

 ation of the marvellous. ' Hand and arm/ he informs 

 us, ' were apparently those of a female. 5 How did he 

 know this? A child of five could not distinguish 

 between the * livid and sodden ' hand and arm of a man 

 and the ' livid and sodden ' hand and arm of a woman. 

 His imagination, haunted by the woman of Jack Grant's 

 narrative, created her. 



The whole affair, then, resolves itself into a strong 

 mental impression of little Hugh's throwing itself out in 

 bodiless form on the mist of the night. And as was 

 the boy so was the man. J\. sustained intensity of 

 mental vision, a creative power of fantasy, characterized 

 Miller to the last. Not powerful enough to overbear 

 or to pervert the scientific instinct with which it was 

 associated, it had a pervasive influence on his mental 

 operations ; the feeling, belief, impression on his mind, 

 had for him a substantive reality; and there was an 

 antecedent probability that, if the steadiness of his 

 intellectual nerve were shaken by disease, or by excess 

 of mental toil, some fixed idea might obtain the mastery 

 over him and hurl his reason from her throne. 



It has been said that his mother was not remarkable 



