It much increased Curdie's feeling of the strangeness of the whole
affair, that, the next morning, when they were at work in the mine,
the party of which he and his father were two, just as if they had
known what had happened to him the night before, began talking
about all manner of wonderful tales that were abroad in the
country, chiefly, of course, those connected with the mines, and
the mountains in which they lay. Their wives and mothers and
grandmothers were their chief authorities. For when they sat by
their firesides they heard their wives telling their children the
selfsame tales, with little differences, and here and there one
they had not heard before, which they had heard their mothers and
grandmothers tell in one or other of the same cottages.

At length they came to speak of a certain strange being they called
Old Mother Wotherwop. Some said their wives had seen her. It
appeared as they talked that not one had seen her more than once.
Some of their mothers and grandmothers, however, had seen her also,
and they all had told them tales about her when they were children.
They said she could take any shape she liked, but that in reality
she was a withered old woman, so old and so withered that she was
as thin as a sieve with a lamp behind it; that she was never seen
except at night, and when something terrible had taken place, or
was going to take place - such as the falling in of the roof of a
mine, or the breaking out of water in it.

She had more than once been seen - it was always at night - beside
some well, sitting on the brink of it, and leaning over and
stirring it with her forefinger, which was six times as long as any
of the rest. And whoever for months after drank of that well was