Orkney Witch

Some sixty years since an old weird woman lived in Stromness, who sold winds to mariners at a remarkably low figure. For the small charge of six-pence, “awful Bessie Miller” would sell a wind to a skipper from any
point of the compass he chose to have it.

In Orkney there are, it is said, old women still living who earn an “honest penny” by controlling nature; there is not a pain, from the first that a child can cause to the last a mortal endures in getting rid of mortality, but these crones profess to relieve.

We learn too, on competent authority, that old Orkney women still retain an unaccountable aversion to turbot, and avoid naming it when crossiun sounds and bays in boats.

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