rer, probably points to a purpose of introducing the
seer to the society of the dead. The custom, as applied to prophets, might
survive, even where the burial rite had altered, or cannot be ascertained,
and might survive, for corpses, where it had gone out of use, for seers.
The Scotch used to justify their practice of putting the head between
the knees when, bound with a corpse's hair tether, they learned to
be second-sighted, by what Elijah did. The prophet, on the peak of
Carmel, 'cast himself down upon the earth, and put his face between his
knees.'[37] But the cases are not analogous. Elijah had been hearing a
premonitory 'sound of abundance of rain' in a cloudless sky. He was
probably engaged in prayer, not in prophecy.

Kirk, by the way, notes that if the wind changes, while the Scottish seer
is bound, he is in peril of his life. So children are told, in Scotland,
that, if the wind changes while they are making faces, the grimace will be
permanent. The seer will, in the same way, become what he pretends to be,
a corpse.

This desertion of Carver's tale may be pardoned for the curiosity of the
topic. He goes on:

'Being thus bound up like an Egyptian mummy' (Carver unconsciously making
my point), 'the seer was lifted into the chest-like enclosure. I could now
also discern him as plain as I had ever done, and I took care not to turn
my eyes away a moment'--in which effort he probably failed.

The priest now began to mutter, and finally spoke in a mixed jargon of
scarcely intelligible dialects. He now yelled, prayed, and foamed at the
mouth, till in about three quarters of an hour he was exhausted and
speechless. 'But in an instant he sprang upon his feet, notwithstanding at
the time he was put in it appeared impossible for him to move either his
legs or arms, and shaking off his covering, as quick as if the bands with
which it had been bound were burst asunder,' he prophesied. The Great
Spirit did not say when the traders would arrive, but, just after high
noon, next day, a canoe would arrive, and the people in it would tell when
the traders were to appear.

Next day, just after high noon, a canoe came round a point of land about a
league away, and the men in it, who had met the traders, said they would
come in two days, which they did. Carver, professing freedom from any
tincture of credulity, leaves us 'to draw what conclusions we please.'

The natural inference is 'private information,' about which the only