The Soul That Leaves the Sleeper

Hugh Miller heard a Highland tale of two young men resting by a ruin on a hot day. As one slept, the other saw a tiny misty creature no bigger than a bumble bee come out of his mouth, cross a runnel on some grass stalks and go into the ruin; when the watcher shook his friend it flew back into his mouth, and the sleeper complained he had been robbed of a dream of a silver bridge and a palace full of gold. Chambers’s writer heard the story often from an old Ross-shire man who took it as proof that the soul lives on, and who said the same little form had been seen leaving the mouths of the dying.