These are unquestionably the corpse lights, called in Wales Canhwyllan Cyrph, which are sometimes seen to illuminate the spot where a dead body is concealed.  The editor is informed, that, some years ago, the corpse of a man, drowned in the Ettrick, below Selkirk, was discovered by means of these candles.  Such lights are common in church-yards, and are probably of a phosphoric nature.  But rustic superstition derives them from supernatural agency, and supposes, that, as soon as life has departed, a pale flame appears at the window of the house, in which the person had died, and glides towards the church-yard, tracing through every winding the route of the future funeral, and pausing where the bier is to rest.  This and other opinions, relating to the “tomb-fires’ livid gleam,” seem to be of Runic extraction.

  The deepest pot in a’ the linn.—­P. 403. v. 5.

The deep holes, scooped in the rock by the eddies of a river, are called pots; the motion of the water having there some resemblance to a boiling cauldron.

  Linn, means the pool beneath a cataract.

  The maiden touched the clay-cauld corpse,
  A drop it never bled.—­P. 405. v.  I.

This verse, which is restored from tradition, refers to a superstition formerly received in most parts of Europe, and even resorted to, by judicial authority, for the discovery of murder.  In Germany, this experiment was called bahr-recht, or the law of the bier; because, the murdered body being stretched upon a bier, the suspected person was obliged to put one hand upon the wound, and the other upon the mouth of the deceased, and, in that posture, call upon heaven to attest his innocence.  If, during this ceremony, the blood gushed from the mouth, nose, or wound, a circumstance not unlikely to happen in the course of shifting or stirring the body, it was held sufficient evidence of the guilt of the party.

The same singular kind of evidence, although reprobated by Mathaeus and Carpzovius, was admitted in the Scottish criminal courts, at the short distance of one century.  My readers may be amused by the following instances: 

“The laird of Auchindrane (Muir of Auchindrane, in Ayrshire) was accused of a horrid and private murder, where there were no witnesses, and which the Lord had witnessed from heaven, singularly by his own hand, and proved the deed against him.  The corpse of the man being buried in Girvan church-yard, as a man cast away at sea, and cast out there, the laird of Colzean, whose servant he had been, dreaming of him in his sleep, and that he had a particular mark upon his body, came and took up the body, and found it to be the same person; and caused all that lived near by come and touch the corpse, as is usual in such cases.  All round the place came but Auchindrane and his son, whom nobody suspected, till a young child of his, Mary Muir, seeing the people examined, came in among them; and, when she came near the dead body, it sprang out in bleeding; upon which they were apprehended, and put to the torture.”—­WODROW’S History, Vol.  I. p. 513.  The trial of Auchindrane happened in 1611.  He was convicted and executed.—­HUME’S Criminal Law, Vol.  I. p. 428.