year) in the hills west of D-. He did not return, a terrible snowstorm
set in, and finally he and his friends were found dead in a bothy, which
the tempest had literally destroyed. Large stones from the walls were
found lying at distances of a hundred yards; the wooden uprights were
twisted like broken sticks. The Captain was lying dead, without his
clothes, on the bed; one man was discovered at a distance, another near
the Captain. Then it was remembered that, at the same bothy a month
before, a shepherd lad had inquired for the Captain, had walked with him
for some time, and that, on the officer's return, "a mysterious anxiety
hung about him." A fire had also been seen blazing on an opposite
height, and when some of the gillies went to the spot, "there was no fire
to be seen." On the day when the expedition had started, the Captain was
warned of the ill weather, but he said "he _must_ go." He was an
unpopular man, and was accused of getting money by procuring recruits
from the Highlands, often by cruel means. "Our informer told us nothing
more; he neither told us his own opinion, nor that of the country, but
left it to our own notions of the manner in which good and evil is
rewarded in this life to suggest the author of the miserable event. He
seemed impressed with superstitious awe on the subject, and said, 'There
was na the like seen in a' Scotland.' The man is far advanced in years
and is a schoolmaster in the neighbourhood of Rannoch."

Sir Walter says that "the feeling of superstitious awe annexed to the
catastrophe could not have been improved by any circumstances of
additional horror which a poet could have invented." But is there not
something more moving still in the boatman's version: "they were never
seen again . . . they were not found indeed till this day"?

The folklorist, of course, is eager to know whether the boatman's much
more complete and connected narrative is a popular mythical development