Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 6 1888.djvu/159

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THE FOLK-LORE OF SUTHERLANDSHIRE.
151

with a sword. When the boat came along they saw that the man had the face of Sweno the king's son. Then Sweno shot the fisherman of Glendhu dead—he crying out as he died, "Eh! Mes me hae, es me fuhr!" (If I 'gan it before, ah! I get it now!) The place is called Porst-an-Stuvanaig to this day.—(From J. McLeod.)

[The prince's heart was buried here. His sailors embalmed the body, and took it back to Sweden, to lay it in the king's choir — at least so said a fisherman on the Lax-Fiord who told me this tale, but Pennant gives another version. "Torfaus mentions a bloody battle fought in this firth, at a place called Glendhu, by two pirates; one of them he calls Ordranus Gillius, the other Svenus."—(Pennant, vol. iii. p. 342.)

The fatality of one locality to certain persons has always been maintained. The oracle warned Cambyses that he should die in Eckbatana. The prince determined never to go there; but, on being accidentally wounded in the chase, he asked the name of the spot to which they had brought him to be treated for his wound; he was told that it was called "Eckbatana," and immediately expired.

Twardowsky (the Dr. Faustus or Michael Scott of Lithuania) sold his soul to the devil, with this condition that the fiend could only claim it if they chanced to meet in Rome. The wizard avoided any visit to the city of St. Peter; but in a hamlet of his native land, which chanced to be called "Roma," the devil accosted him, and Twardowsky had difficulty in baffling the fiend.

Henry IV. considered the prophecy that he should die in Jerusalem to be fulfilled by his death in the "Jerusalem Chamber" at Westminster.

The late Emperor Louis Napoleon had been told and he believed that the streets of London would be fatal to him.

Captain Campbell was warned by the ghost of a murdered kinsman that he must render his soul at Ticonderoga. He had never heard of such a place, and the name was quite unknown in Argyllshire. But the war of American Independence broke out, Campbell went to America with his regiment, and, while lying wounded under the walls of Fort-Edward, he learned just before he expired that the Indian name of the spot was "Ticonderoga."]