Saturday 05 Jul 1845 (p. 2, col. 4-5) SUPERSTITION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. ----- "By my faith a marvellous story."-OLD PLAY. Lord BYRON protests that "truth is strange-stranger than fiction;" and when we have done with our narrative our readers will be convinced that the poet was right; for the story we are about to tell, all the circumstances considered, is more extravagantly ludicrous than any invented by the wildest romancer, and were it not that the parties who figure in it are living, and that their freaks were seen by numerous individuals, it would be incredible. Whatever wonders may be wrought by time, it should seem that in our own county, and within a stone's throw of the residence of the Home Secretary of "the most enlightened nation in the world" there are men who are still influenced by superstitions which, we had wrongly imagined, were buried in oblivion,-heard only from the lips of the ancient-ballad monger, or read in the pages of PERCY. Now to our tale. In the parish of Kirkandrews-upon-Esk, which, fringing Scotland as it does, may be properly termed a border-parish, there lived within the memory of very young people, a yeoman, by the name of John JOHNSTONE. At least that was the name the parson gave him: he was better known afterwards as "Jock o' the Gill." In his district a name of this description is considered rather complimentary than otherwise: it is, in short, a mark of distinction that has prevailed since the good old times of Clym of the Cleugh and William of Cloudesly. Well, Jock o' the Gill was an industrious, thrifty farmer who, by exercising through a long series of years the caution of making a prisoner of every sovereign he earned, had accumulated a store which not only supported him in comfort during his declining years, but enabled him to make some little provision for his nephew and niece,-James and Elizabeth GRAHAM, or, as he was wont familiary to call them, Jemmy and Betty,-who lived with him and who had helped him for a number of years in the management of his farm. The three lived together, for the most part, happily; but, as little tifts will arise in the best regulated families, it is not extraordinary that there was occasionally a "difference." It is rather melancholy, however, that there should have been some unpleasantness on the very day of his death, which is just six years ago. The morning's work was over, and Jock, Jemmy, and Betty, were seated in the kitchen, at their humble noon-tide repast. From some cause or other which does not appear-whether it was that the bacon was too fat, the potatoes not enough, or the buttermilk sour, we have not heard-high words were bandied about. Betty having said something to rouse Jemmy's combativeness, without more to do he laid down his knife and fork, aimed an unmanly blow with his fist at her face, and, before the old man could say Jack Robinson, she was sprawling on the floor-and there she lay insensible. What Jemmy did, or what Jock did-whether Jock, attempting to speak in the act of swallowing a potatoe had choked himself, and Jemmy, alarmed, had fled for assistance, our little bird has not been able to inform us; but certain it is that when Betty came to herself again her assailant had disappeared, and her uncle, apparently sharing her own fate, was lying like a lifeless thing on the floor-with a potatoe in his mouth. There was no assistance at hand, and she therefore set about to raise him from the floor and place him on the "swab" or settle. He was dead. So runs the story as it is told and believed in the neighbourhood. It does not appear that it made much noise at the time, or that suspicion attached to Jemmy; for Jock o' the Gill was quietly gathered to his fathers in the parish church yard, without any Coroner's inquiry, and his nephew and neice, forgetting their trifling disagreement on the day of the old man's death, made all things up again, and amicably divided the uncle's property between them, under the will which he had made to that effect. Betty went to live with her father Mr. James GRAHAM of the Scug-better known as Jem o' the Scug-and Jemmy, the son, until recently, tilled the lands which had proved so profitable to his uncle. Fortune smiled on him: he went on prosperously in his calling; and, with the assistance of an occasional windfall, in the shape of a lucky bet or two on the turf, (for it should seem he is somewhat of a sporting turn,) he bought, not long ago, the estate of Thorny Knowe, in Nichol Forest, on which he now resides. But Jemmy has had his troubles. Neighbours began to whisper that had old Jock o' the Gill lived a day longer, Jemmy would not have been the man he is now, for that Jock had intended, on the very next day, (had he not himself been cut off with a potatoe) to have altered his will and cut both Jemmy and Betty off with a shilling. Jemmy however, like a sensible man, paid no attention to these idle tales; he ploughed his fields, reaped his harvests, and held his kurn suppers without caring for the gossips. We have already said that he does a small matter on the turf. On the 1st of June, this year, he went to Hawick races, leaving in charge of his house one Isaac MILBURN, who, to a sprinkling of knowledge as to the curing of pork, adds a smattering of the more spiritual business of the cure of souls. In short, Isaac MILBURN is a retired itinerant methodist parson, who can rap out a prayer upon occasion, with a good nasal twang, without caring for either COBBETT or Lindley MURRAY. Finding himself in a strange bed room on the first night, he took the prudent precaution of examining the room to see if all was safe, before committing himself to the sheets. He looked under the bed and behind the curtains; and found nothing there that could interfere with his orisons before lying down, or his snoring afterwards. Report says that, having taken a stiff tumbler of whiskey-toddy before going to bed, he forgot that night to say his prayers. But this is neither hither nor thither: the best men are absent sometimes. He had neither to count the slow passing of a flock of sheep or to imagine the dropping of water to court slumber; he snored loudly till 12 o'clock. The sound of the last "chap" awoke him, and at the same moment the colley dog, in the farm yard, set up a furious barking. Being rather dry, he stretched his hand out of bed for the water jug, and was conveying it to his lips when the latch of his bed-room door was lifted with a gentle but palpable click. Isaac let fall the jug, and looked towards the door. There was a figure coming towards the bed. "Who the devil's there?" cried Isaac, forgetting that he was a parson. The figure made no answer, but advanced to the bed-side. Isaac trembled from head to foot, and his hair stood on end. His first impulse was to hide himself under the bed-clothes; but, afraid of smothering himself, he decided on facing the figure, who seemed to be a very gentlemanly fellow, whoever he might be, for he made no noise, and never spoke, which gave the parson time and courage to eye him attentively. The figure had on an old blue coat, a patched red coloured velveteen waiscoat, and corduroy breeches. "By G-," exclaimed Isaac, (again forgetting he was a parson) "it's Jock of the Gill's wraith!" To think that a ghost was in the room, and he alone! He was "distilled almost to jelly with the act of fear;" or, to use his own more homely words, he "fell into a muck of a sweat." The words of Hamlet rushed on his mind:- "Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked or charitable, . . . . . O answer me, Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell Why thy canonised bones, hearsed in death, Have burst their cerements! why the sepulchre Wherein we saw thee quietly inurned Hath ope'd its ponderous and marble jaws To cast thee up again! What may this mean, That thou, dead corse, . . . . Revisitst thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous?" [to be continued]