It was a fine spring morning, with the sea lying still on either side of the uplands, and the sun, through clouds of broken crimson, peering over the shoulder of the Calf like a blood-shot eye. Bessie had no need to ask her way to the witch-doctor's house, for troops of young girls were coming down from it, generally in pairs, whispering and laughing merrily. At length she came upon it--a one-storey thatched cottage with a queue of girls outside. When the last of the girls had gone, and Bessie still stood waiting on the opposite side of the rutted space which served for a road, a wisp of a woman, with hair and eyebrows as black as a shoe, but a face as wrinkled as the trunk of the trammon tree, came to the door and said, "Come in, my fine young woman. There's nothing to be freckened of." It was Nan, the witch-doctor, and Bessie followed her into the house. The inside was a single room with a fire at one end and a bed at the other. The floor was of hardened clay and the scraas of the roof were so low overhead that a tall man could scarcely have stood erect under them. Bundles of herbs hung from nails in the sooty rafters and when the old woman closed the door, Bessie saw that the _Crosh cuirn_ (the cross of mountain ash) was standing at the back of it. "I'm in trouble, ma'am," said Bessie, who was on the verge of tears, "and I'm wanting to know what to do and what is to happen to me." The witch-doctor, whose quick eyes had taken in the situation at a glance, said, "Aw yes, bogh, trouble enough. But knock that cat off the cheer in the choillagh and sit down and make yourself comfortable." Bessie loosened her fur-lined cloak and sat in the ingle, with the fire at her feet and a peep of the blue sky coming down on her from the wide chimney. "They were telling me a fine young woman was coming," said the witch-doctor (she meant the invisible powers), "and it was wondering and wondering I was would she have strength to climb the brews. But here you are, my chree, and now a cup o' tay will do no harm at all." Bessie tried to refuse, but the old woman said, "Chut! A cup o' tay is nothing and here's my taypot on the warm turf and the tay at the best, too." While Bessie sipped at her cup the witch-doctor went on talking, but she took quick glances at the girl from time to time and sometimes asked a question. At length she bolted the door, drew a thick blind over the window, knelt before the hearth, and called on Bessie to do the same, so that they were kneeling side by side, with no light in the darkened room except the red glow from the fire on their faces and the blue streak from the sky behind the smoke from the chimney.