ship laden with precious metals, but a horrible murder was committed on
board. A plague broke out amongst the crew, and no port would allow the
vessel to enter for fear of contagion, and so she still wanders about
the sea with her phantom crew, never to rest, but doomed to be tossed
about for ever. She is now a spectral ship, and hovers about the Cape of
Good Hope as an omen of bad luck to mariners who are so unfortunate as
to see her.

The dangerous places at each end of the Firth were likened to the Scylla
and Charybdis between Italy and Sicily, where, in avoiding one mariners
were often wrecked by the other; but the dangers in the Firth were from
the "Merry Men of Mey," a dangerous expanse of sea, where the water was
always boiling like a witch's cauldron at one end, and the dreaded
"Swalchie Whirlpool" at the other. This was very dangerous for small
boats, as they could sail over it safely in one state of the tide, but
when it began to move it carried the boat round so slowly that the
occupants did not realise their danger until too late, when they found
themselves going round quicker and quicker as they descended into the
awful vortex below, where the ancient Vikings firmly believed the
submarine mill existed which ground the salt that supplied the ocean.

We ought not to have read these dismal stories just before retiring to
rest, as the consequence was that we were dreaming of dangerous rocks,
storms, and shipwrecks all through the night, and my brother had toiled
up the hill at the back of the town and found Bessie Miller there, just
as Sir Walter Scott described her, with "a clay-coloured kerchief folded
round her head to match the colour of her corpse-like complexion." He
was just handing her a sixpence to pay for a favourable wind, when
everything was suddenly scattered by a loud knock at the door, followed
by the voice of our hostess informing us that it was five o'clock and