The View from Castle Rock

a familiar yet courteous way, to Walter.
    “There is no telling what happened to the fellow’s sheep. I hope the fairies did not get them.”

    Walter is alarmed, not knowing what to say. But Nettie looks at him with calming reassurance and the slightest smile, then drops her eyes and waits beside her father as a demure little miss should.
    “Are you writing down what you can make of this?” the man asks, nodding at Walter’s notebook.
    “I am writing a journal of the voyage,” Walter says stiffly.
    “Now that is interesting. That is an interesting fact because I too am keeping a journal of this voyage. I wonder if we find the same things worth writing of.”
    “I only write what happens,” Walt says, wanting to make clear that this is a job for him and not any idle pleasure. Still he feels that some further justification is called for. “I am writing to keep track of every day so that at the end of the voyage I can send a letter home.”
    The man’s voice is smoother and his manner gentler than any address Walter is used to. He wonders if he is being made sport of in some way. Or if Nettie’s father is the sort of person who strikes up an acquaintance with you in the hope of getting hold of your money for some worthless investment.
    Not that Walter’s looks or dress would mark him out as any likely prospect.
    “So you do not describe what you see? Only what-as you say-is happening?”
    Walter is about to say no, and then yes. For he has just thought, if he writes that there is a rough wind, is that not describing? You do not know where you are with this kind of person.
    “You are not writing about what we have just heard?”
    “No.”
    “It might be worth it. There are people who go around now prying into every part of Scotland and writing down whatever these old country folk have to say. They think that the old songs and stories are disappearing and that they are worth recording. I don’t know about that, it isn’t my business. But I would not be surprised if the people who have written it all down will find that it was worth their trouble-I mean to say, there will be money in it.”
    Nettie speaks up unexpectedly.
    “Oh, hush, Father. The old fellow is going to start again.”
    This is not what any daughter would say to her father in Walter’s experience, but the man seems ready to laugh, looking down at her fondly.
    “Just one more thing I have to ask,” he says. “What do you think of this about the fairies?”
    “I think it is all nonsense,” says Walter.
    “He
has
started again,” says Nettie crossly.
    And indeed, Old James’s voice has been going this little while, breaking in determinedly and reproachfully on those of his audience who might have thought it was time for their own conversations.
    “… and still another time, but in the long days in the summer, out on the hills late in the day but before it was well dark…”
    The tall man nods but looks as if he had something still to inquire of Walter. Nettie reaches up and claps her hand over his mouth.
    “And I will tell you and swear my life upon it that Will could not tell a lie, him that in his young days went to church to the preacher Thomas Boston, and Thomas Boston put the fear of the Lord like a knife into every man and woman, till their dying day. No, never. He would not lie.”

***

    “So that was all nonsense?” says the tall man quietly, when he is sure that the story has ended. “Well I am inclined to agree. You have a modern turn of mind?”
    Walter says yes, he has, and he speaks more stoutly than he did before. He has heard these stories his father is spouting, and others like them, for the whole of his life, but the odd thing is that until they came on board this ship he never heard them from his father. The father he has known up till a short while ago would, he is certain, have had no use for them.
    “This is a terrible place we live in,” his father used to say. “The people is all full of nonsense and bad habits and even our sheep’s wool is so coarse you cannot sell it. The roads are so bad a horse cannot go more than four miles in an hour. And for ploughing here they use the spade or the old Scotch plough though there has been a better plough in other places for fifty years. Oh, aye, aye, they say when you ask them, oh aye but it’s too steep hereabouts, the land is too heavy.”
    “To be born in the Ettrick is to be born in a backward place,” he would say. “Where the people is all