sandbanks and sunken rocks like sea-gulls, cast their anchor in Blawhooly
Bay, while the shadowy figure lowers down the boat, and augments their
numbers with the four unhappy mortals to whose memory a stone stands in
the kirkyard, with a sinking ship and a shoreless sea cut upon it. Then
the spectre ships vanish, and the drowning shriek of mortals and the
rejoicing laugh of fiends are heard, and the old hulls are left as a
memorial that the old spiritual kingdom has not departed from the earth.
But I maun away, and trim my little cottage fire, and make it burn and
blaze up bonnie, to warm the crickets and my cold and crazy bones that
maun soon be laid aneath the green sod in the eerie kirkyard." And away
the old dame tottered to her cottage, secured the door on the inside, and
soon the hearth-flame was seen to glimmer and gleam through the keyhole
and window.

"I'll tell ye what," said the old mariner, in a subdued tone, and with a
shrewd and suspicious glance of his eye after the old sibyl, "it's a word
that may not very well be uttered, but there are many mistakes made in
evening stories if old Moll Moray there, where she lives, knows not
mickle more than she is willing to tell of the Haunted Ships and their
unhallowed mariners. She lives cannily and quietly; no one knows how she
is fed or supported; but her dress is aye whole, her cottage ever smokes,
and her table lacks neither of wine, white and red, nor of fowl and fish,
and white bread and brown. It was a dear scoff to Jock Matheson, when he
called old Moll the uncanny carline of Blawhooly: his boat ran round and
round in the centre of the Solway--everybody said it was enchanted--and
down it went head foremost; and hadna Jock been a swimmer equal to a
sheldrake, he would have fed the fish. But I'll warrant it sobered the
lad's speech; and he never reckoned himself safe till he made old Moll
the present of a new kirtle and a stone of cheese."