CHAPTER IV

UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS

77. WHEN I was about eight or nine I had a bad feverish illness at Dunkeld, during which I believe I was in some danger, and am sure I was very uncomfortable. It came on after a long walk in which I had been gathering quantities of foxgloves, and pulling them to pieces to examine their seeds; and there were hints about their having poisoned me, very absurd, but which extended the gathering awe from river eddies¹ to foxglove dells. Not long after that, when we were back at home, my cousin Jessie fell ill, and died very slowly, of water on the brain. I was very sorry, not so much in any strength of early affection, as in the feeling that the happy, happy days at Perth were for ever ended, since there was no more Jessie.²

Before her illness took its fatal form,-before, indeed, I believe it had at all declared itself-my aunt dreamed one of her foresight dreams, simple and plain enough for any one’s interpretation;-that she was approaching the ford of a dark river, alone, when little Jessie came running up behind her, and passed her, and went through first. Then she passed through herself, and looking back from the other side, saw her old Mause approaching from the distance to the bank of the stream. And so it was, that Jessie, immediately afterwards, sickened rapidly and died; and a few months, or it might be nearly a year afterwards, my aunt died of decline; and Mause, some two or three years

¹ [See above, § 74 (p. 67).]

² [For an “Ossianic” poem written two or three years later, “On the Death of my Cousin Jessie,” see Vol. II. p. 285.]

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