Not more than a mile from the tent there stood an inhabited cottage. The solitary tenant, an elderly woman, still known to tradition as _Stine Bheag o’ Tarbat_, was famous at this time as one in league with Satan, and much consulted by seafaring men when windbound in any of the neighbouring ports. And her history, as related by her neighbours, formed, like the histories of all the other witches of Scotland, a strange medley of the very terrible and the very ludicrous. A shipmaster, who had unwittingly offended her, had moored his vessel one evening within the rocky bay of Portmahomack, a haven of Tarbat; but on going on deck next morning, he found that the vessel had been conveyed during the night over the rocks and the beach, a broad strip of meadow, two corn-fields, and a large moor, into a deep muddy ditch; and there would she have lain till now had he not found means to conciliate the witch, who on the following night transported her to her former moorings. With all this power, however, it so happened, that only a few weeks after a farmer of the parish, whom she had long annoyed in the shape of a black beetle, succeeded in laying hold of her as she hummed round his bonnet, and confined her for four days in his snuff-box. Shortly before the arrival of the Cromarty men, a small sloop had been weather-bound for a few days in a neighbouring port; and the master applied to _Stine_ for a wind. Part of his cargo consisted of foreign spirits; and on taking leave of the witch he brought with him two empty bottles, which he promised to fill, and send to her by the ship-boy. It was evening, however, before he reached the vessel; the boy would not venture on carrying the bottles by night to the witch’s cottage; and on the following morning they were forgotten in the hurry of sailing. The wind blew directly off the land, from what the master deemed the very best point of the compass; the vessel scudded down the Firth before it under a tight sail; it freshened as the land receded, and the mainsail was lowered reef after reef, until as the evening was darkening it had increased into a hurricane. The master stood by the helm, and in casting an anxious glance at the binnacle, to ascertain his course, his eye caught the two bottles of _Stine Bheag_. “Ah, witch!” he muttered, “I must get rid of thee;” and taking up one of the bottles he raised his arm to throw it over the side, when he was interrupted by a hoarse croaking above-head, and on looking up saw two ravens hovering round the vane. The bottle was replaced. An immense wave came rolling behind in the wake of the vessel; it neared; it struck the stern, and, rushing over the deck, washed everything before it, spars, coops, cordage; but only the bottles were carried overboard. In the moment they rose to the surface the ravens darted upon them like sea-gulls on a shoal of coal-fish; and the master, as the vessel swept along, could see them bearing the bottles away. The hurricane gradually subsided into