o 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 peddler.
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
subsistence by selling favorable winds to mariners. Her dwelling 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 Aeolus himself, in whose
commodities the inhabitant dealt. She herself was, as she told us,
nearly one hundred years old, withered and dried up like a mummy. A
clay-colored kerchief, folded round her head, corresponded in color to
her corpse-like complexion. Two light-blue eyes that gleamed with a
lustre like that of insanity, an utterance 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 harbor, 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, surrounded by a tall dry-stone fence. It is
all that survives--for the old dwelling-house to which it was attached
was pulled down several years ago--of the patrimony of Gow the "Pirate;"
and is not a little interesting, as having formed the central nucleus
round which,--like those bits of thread or wire on which the richly
saturated fluids of the chemist solidify and crystallize,--the entire
fiction of the novelist aggregated and condensed under the influence of
forces operative only in minds of genius. A white, tall, old-fashioned
house, conspicuous on the hill-side, looks out across the bay towards
the square inclosure, which it directly fronts. And it is surely a
curious coincidence, that while in one of these two erections, only a
few hundred yards apart, one of the heroes of Scott saw the light, the
other should