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This is, undeniably, 'a puir show for Kirkintilloch, a meagre collection of savage death-wraiths, but it may be so meagre by reason of want of research, or of lack of records, travellers usually pooh-poohing the benighted superstitions of the heathen, or fearing to seem superstitious if they chronicle instances.
The modern civilised examples of death-wraiths, attested and recorded in Phantasms of the Living, are numerous; but statistics prove that a lady who marries again on the strength of a wraith may commit an error of judgment, and become liable to the penalty of bigamy. The Maoris, no statisticians, take a more liberal and tolerant view.
If I may judge by my own lifelong success in mislaying, losing, and casually destroying papers, from cheques to notes made for literary purposes, from interesting letters of friends to the manuscripts of novelists, or if I may judge by Sir Walter Scott's triumphs of the same kind, I should not think much of the disappearance of documentary evidence to death-wraiths.
The modern 'spiritualistic' theory, again, that the dead man's 'spirit' is actually present to the percipient, in space, corresponds to, and is derived from, the animistic philosophy of the savage. But we may believe in such 'death-wraiths, or hallucinatory appearances of the dying, without being either savages or spiritualists.
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