fast as we entered Stromness, but what a strange-looking town it seemed to us!  It was built at the foot of the hill in the usual irregular manner and in one continuous crooked street, with many of the houses with their crow-stepped gables built as it were over the sea itself, and here in one of these, owing to a high recommendation received inland, we stayed the night.  It was perched above the water’s edge, and, had we been so minded, we might have caught the fish named sillocks for our own breakfast without leaving the house:  many of the houses, indeed, had small piers or landing-stages attached to them, projecting towards the bay.

We found Mrs. Spence an ideal hostess and were very comfortable, the only drawback to our happiness being the information that the small steamboat that carried mails and passengers across to Thurso had gone round for repairs “and would not be back for a week, but a sloop would take her place” the day after to-morrow.  But just fancy crossing the stormy waters of the Pentland Firth in a sloop!  We didn’t quite know what a sloop was, except that it was a sailing-boat with only one mast; but the very idea gave us the nightmare, and we looked upon ourselves as lost already.  The mail boat, we had already been told, had been made enormously strong to enable her to withstand the strain of the stormy seas, besides having the additional advantage of being propelled by steam, and it was rather unfortunate that we should have arrived just at the time she was away.  We asked the reason why, and were informed that during the summer months seaweeds had grown on the bottom of her hull four or five feet long, which with the barnacles so impeded her progress that it was necessary to have them scraped off, and that even the great warships had to undergo the same process.

Seaweeds of the largest size and most beautiful colours flourish, in the Orcadean seas, and out of 610 species of the flora in the islands we learned that 133 were seaweeds.  Stevenson the great engineer wrote that the large Algae, and especially that one he named the “Fucus esculentus,” grew on the rocks from self-grown seed, six feet in six months, so we could quite understand how the speed of a ship would be affected when carrying this enormous growth on the lower parts of her hull.

Wednesday, September 13th.

We had the whole of the day at our disposal to explore Stromness and the neighbourhood, and we made the most of it by rambling about the town and then along the coast to the north, but we were seldom out of sight of the great mountains of Hoy.

Sir Walter Scott often visited this part of the Orkneys, and some of the characters he introduced in his novels were found here.  In 1814 he made the acquaintance of a very old woman near Stromness, named Bessie Miller, whom he described as being nearly one hundred years old, withered and dried up like a mummy, with light blue eyes that gleamed with a lustre like that of insanity.  She eked out her existence by selling favourable winds to mariners, for which her fee was sixpence, and hardly a mariner sailed out to sea from Stromness without visiting and paying his offering to Old Bessie Miller.  Sir Walter drew the strange, weird character of “Norna of the Fitful Head” in his novel The Pirate from her.