Curiously enough, a different version of Dr. Pitcairn’s dream is in existence.  Several anecdotes about the doctor are prefixed, in manuscript, to a volume of his Latin poems, which was shown to Dr. Hibbert by Mr. David Laing, the well-known historian and antiquarian.  Dr. Hibbert says:  ’The anecdotes are from some one obviously on terms of intimacy with Pitcairn’.  According to this note Robert Lindsay, a descendant of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, was at college with the doctor.  They made the covenant that ’whoever dyed first should give account of his condition if possible’.  This was in 1671, in 1675 Lindsay died, while Pitcairn was in Paris.  On the night of Lindsay’s death, Pitcairn dreamed that he was in Edinburgh, where Lindsay met him and said, ’Archie, perhaps ye heard I’m dead?’ ‘No, Roben.’  The vision said he was to be buried in the Grey Friars, and offered to carry Pitcairn to a happy spiritual country, ‘in a well sailing small ship,’ like Odysseus..  Pitcairn said he must first see his parents.  Lindsay promised to call again.  ’Since which time A. P. never slept a night without dreaming that Lindsay told him he was alive.  And, having a dangerous sickness, anno 1694, he was told by Roben that he was delayed for a time, and that it was properly his task to carry him off, but was discharged to tell when.’ {300} Dr. Hibbert thinks that Pitcairn himself dictated this account, much more marvellous than the form in which Wodrow received the story.

Leaving a solitary Jacobite vision, for a true blue Presbyterian ‘experience,’ we learn that Wodrow’s own wedded wife had a pious vision, ‘a glorious, inexpressible brightness’.  The thought which came presently was, ’This perhaps may be Satan, transforming himself into an angel of light’.  ‘It mout or it moutn’t.’  In 1729, Wodrow heard of the ghost of the Laird of Coul, which used to ride one of his late tenants, transformed into a spectral horse.  A chap-book containing Coul’s discourse with Mr. Ogilby, a minister, was very popular in the last century.  Mr. Ogilby left an account in manuscript, on which the chap-book was said to be based.  Another ghost of a very moral turn appeared, and gave ministers information about a case of lawless love.  This is said to be recorded in the registers of the Presbytery of Fordoun, but Wodrow is vague about the whole affair.

We next come to a very good ghost of the old and now rather unfashionable sort.  The authority is Mr. William Brown, who had it from the Rev. Mr. Mercer of Aberdalgie, ’as what was generally belived as to Dr. Rule, Principal at Edinburgh’.  Such is Wodrow’s way, his ideas of evidence are quite rudimentary.  Give him a ghost, and he does not care for ‘contemporary record,’ or ’corroborative testimony’.  To come to the story.  Dr. Rule, finding no room at an inn near Carnie Mount, had a fire lit in a chamber of a large deserted house hard by.  He went to bed, leaving a bright fire burning, when ’the