One or two slight accidents occurred, but to me it seemed marvellous that the boatmen did not injure each other as much as the whales amid the confusion and excitement of the scene. The carcasses, as I was informed, would realize between £300 and £400; and grateful were the people that Providence had remembered the island of Stronsay, by sending them a wonderful windfall of bottle-noses fresh from the confines of the Arctic Circle. DANIEL GORRIE (_“Summers and Winters in the Orkneys.”_) [Illustration: _Wreck at Burgh Head, Stronsay._] ARTICLES MADE OF STRAW. The Orkney peasantry of two centuries ago lived in a poor country—a country ground down by the tyranny of greedy and unscrupulous rulers; a country whose inhabitants had neither the raw materials from which to construct many necessary utensils nor the money to purchase them. It is interesting to note some of the ways in which our forefathers overcame the circumstances in which they were placed. One of the most notable is the ingenious use of straw for the construction of many domestic utensils. The materials from which articles of straw were made were principally _bent_ and the straw of black oats. The bent, after being cut, was loosely bound into rough sheaves and left to dry and wither. It was then bound into neat sheaves called _beats_, the legal size of which used to be two spans in circumference. Each beat was carefully pleated at the upper end, gradually tapering upwards into a cord which served to bind two beats together. The pair of beats so fastened was called a “band of bent,” twelve of which formed a “thrave.” From this bent were made the cords, always called _bands_, which were used in the manufacture of straw. During the long winter evenings each ploughman was required to wind into bands one beat of bent. The cord was spun or twisted by the fingers, the two strands being each twisted singly, and at the same time laid into each other in such a way that the tendency of the strands to untwist was the means of keeping the two firmly twisted together. The straw used was that of the common Orkney black oats, which was at once tougher and more flexible than that of other cultivated kinds. The straw to be used was not threshed with the flail, which would have spoiled it, but was selected from the sheaves, held in a bunch between the hands, and beaten on some hard edge to remove the grain. Such straw was called _gloy_. From those two materials, bent bands and gloy, a very wide variety of indispensable articles were manufactured by the Orkney farmer.