Laig once had its inn, too. The house was pointed out to us, and we were told that the first tenant of that house was a son of MacMhaighstir Alasdair (considered to be the greatest of all our Gaelic poets). Of his son, again, a story was told as we climbed the winding road up the escarpment. It appears that, returning to Laig one night, he was met on this corkscrew by a giant before whom he refused to give way. Perhaps he had been prepared by John Barleycorn for the unequal and desperate contest. Anyway, in the end, he was too much for the giant, and slowly forcing the great body to the brink of the ravine, thrust it over. The following day the Laig bull was missing, and, after search, was found at the bottom of the same ravine with his neck broken.

There is a stream where the ‘washer at the ford’ may still be seen, and if you are foolish enough to ask her what she is washing she will tell you it is your own shroud. There are young folk who would not care to cross it alone after sundown. And doubtless old folk, too. It is an innocent enough looking stream. But there is a way of looking at it.

We talk a lot about superstition and the credulity of simple country folk, and for the most part with some reason, for the giant very often turns out to be the island bull; and when this happens the folk themselves delight in the story and tell it with so happy a gusto that one feels they are pleased not only with the humour of the story but with the relief of it.

For however often one can explain an apparent manifestation of the occult, there is always the odd time when one cannot. Sometimes I wish I had kept a record of second-sight or occult experiences told to me at first hand by men and women whom I should no more doubt than I should the evidence of my own normal senses. It is not a pleasant thing to have one of these experiences. One man, who sees funerals before they take place, is so affected that when the phantom cortege has passed he finds relief in involuntary physical vomit. He hates the ‘gift’, and would not readily speak of it even to his intimates. And occasionally you meet the man, scientifically trained, who is quite at a loss to rationalise what has happened to him, though he tries his best.

For example, here, in brief, is an experience told me recently by a man who has a science degree from a university and was born in the Long Island. He was visiting his sister, who held a professional county appointment on the mainland, and he lodged in a cottage of four rooms, two upstairs and two down, inhabited by two old women, who had their occasional misunderstandings, for one accused the other of ‘wandering in the night’. This was repudiated by the other, and at night each locked her own downstairs door. He had arranged to have his meals with his sister and to sleep in one of the two upstairs bedrooms in the cottage. So far all was simple and clear—until just after he had fallen asleep on the first night, when he was awakened by footsteps coming up the stairs. They paused outside his door and he got up and opened it. There was no one there, and he satisfied himself that the stairs, lit dimly from a roof skylight, was quite vacant. Presently, back in bed, he heard the footsteps come again, and this time after opening the door and seeing no one, he went into the bedroom opposite, searched its cupboard, hunted under its bed, and assured himself definitely that no one had entered and was hiding there. Then he went quietly downstairs and tried the doors of the two rooms. Each was locked on the inside.