206 NETHER LOCHABER. 



and she threatened to tell him a bit of her mind as to his doings on 

 his return the colt at least had been sold, and well sold, for the 

 alder smoke had gone in the best and luckiest of all directions, 

 towards the east, in the direction of the rising sun ; and she had 

 never known the omen fail. The curious thing is that within an 

 hour or so on that very evening the man returned, and counted into 

 his wife's lap two pounds and four shillings sterling over and above 

 the expected price of the colt, as agreed upon at home. The only 

 other curious thing that we could gather in connection with the 

 superstition is that the alder branches must be cut specially for the 

 occasion, and by a virgin. It was so in this case ; and we are 

 gravely assured that, if it had been otherwise, the ascending smoke 

 would either have drifted hither and thither without a purpose, 

 unsteadily, or have uselessly intermingled with that of the neigh- 

 bouring cottages. The superstition, you must know, is a very old 

 one ; the Greeks and Romans practised it, and from them it spread 

 widely over the European Continent. In books on magic and 

 divination it is called Capnomancy, derived, as our friend Professor 

 Blackie could tell you better than anybody else, from the Greek 

 Capnos, smoke, and manteia, divination, witchcraft. The ancients 

 paid attention principally to the smoke of sacrifices, as well as to 

 the briskness with which the fire burned. If the smoke ascended 

 in a straight columnar body zenithwards, it was a favourable omen ; 

 if it was violently blown aside, or fell back over the altar and the 

 sacrificers, it was of evil augury. Our Highland dame's notion of 

 its taking an easterly course, towards the direction of the breaking 

 day, of the dawn, and the morning sun, seems to us full of a rough 

 and rude poetry such as you frequently meet with in carefully 

 examining into the details of even the grossest superstitions. Having 

 had occasion to be of some little service to the priestess in this rare 

 act of divination, we had the whole from her own lips, though she 

 was averse at first, as is generally the case when a clergyman is the 



