480 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



less walls, and of whom sailors, weather-bound in the port, 

 used occasionally to purchase a wind, furnished him with 

 the first conception of his Norna of the Fitful Head ; and 

 an eccentric shopkeeper of the place, who to his dying day 

 used to designate the " Pirate," with much bitterness, as a 

 "lying book," and its author as a "wicked lying man," is 

 said to have suggested the character of Bryce Snailsfoot the 

 pedlar. To the sorceress Sir Walter himself refers in one of 

 his notes. "At the village of Stromness, on the Orkney 

 main island, called Pomona, lived," he says, "in 1814 an 

 aged dame called Bessie Millie, who helped out her subsist- 

 ence by selling favourable winds to mariners. Her dwell- 

 ing and appearance were not unbecoming her pretensions : 

 her house, which was on the brow of the steep hill on which 

 Stromness is founded, was only accessible by a series of dirty 

 and precipitous lanes, and, for exposure, might have been 

 the abode of .^Eolus himself, in whose commodities the inha- 

 bitant dealt. She herself was, as she told us, nearly one 

 hundred years old, withered and dried up like a mummy. A 

 clay-coloured kerchief, folded round her head, corresponded 

 in colour to her corpse-like complexion. Two light-blue 

 eyes that gleamed with a lustre like that of insanity, an ut- 

 terance of astonishing rapidity, a nose and chin that almost 

 met together, and a ghastly expression of cunning, gave her 

 the effect of Hecate. She remembered Gow the pirate, who 

 had been a native of these islands, in which he closed his 

 career. Such was Bessie Millie, to whom the mariners paid 

 a sort of tribute, with a feeling betwixt jest and earnest." 



On the opposite side of Stromness, where the arm of the 

 sea, which forms the harbour, is about a quarter of a mile in 

 width, there is, immediately over the shore, a small square 

 patch of ground, apparently a planticruive, or garden, sur- 

 rounded by a tall dry-stone fence. It is all that survives 

 for the old dwelling-house to which it was attached was 



