The View from Castle Rock

was a part of Nova Scotia and a beautiful hilly country. We saw several whales this day such creatures as I never saw in my life.

    This is the day of wonders. The land is covered with trees like a head with hair and behind the ship the sun rises tipping the top trees with light. The sky is clear and shining as a china plate and the water just playfully ruffled with wind. Every wisp of fog has gone and the air is full of the resinous smell of the trees. Seabirds are flashing above the sails all golden like creatures of Heaven, but the sailors raise a few shots to keep them from the rigging.
    Mary holds Young James up so that he may always remember this first sight of the continent that will forever be his home. She tells him the name of this land-Nova Scotia.
    “It means New Scotland,” she says.
    Agnes hears her. “Then why doesn’t it say so?”
    Mary says, “It’s Latin, I think.”
    Agnes snorts with impatience. The baby has been waked up early by all the hubbub and celebration, and now she is miserable, wanting to be on the breast all the time, wailing whenever Agnes tries to take her off. Young James, observing all this closely, makes an attempt to get on the other breast, and Agnes bats him off so hard that he staggers.
    “Suckie-laddie,” Agnes calls him. He yelps a bit, then crawls around behind her and pinches the baby’s toes.
    Another whack.
    “You’re a rotten egg, you are,” his mother says. “Somebody’s been spoiling you till you think you’re the Laird’s arse.”
    Agnes’s roused voice always makes Mary feel as if she is about to catch a blow herself.
    Old James is sitting with them on the deck, but pays no attention to this domestic unrest.
    “Will you come and look at the country, Father?” says Mary uncertainly. “You can have a better view from the rail.”
    “I can see it well enough,” Old James says. Nothing in his voice suggests that the revelations around them are pleasing to him.
    “Ettrick was covered with trees in the old days,” he says. “The monks had it first and after that it was the royal forest. It was the King’s forest. Beech trees, oak trees, rowan trees.”
    “As many trees as this?” says Mary, made bolder than usual by the novel splendors of the day.
    “Better trees. Older. It was famous all over Scotland. The Royal Forest of Ettrick.”
    “And Nova Scotia is where our brother James is,” Mary continues.
    “He may be or he may not. It would be easy to die here and nobody know you were dead. Wild animals could have eaten him.”
    “Come near this baby again and I’ll skin you alive,” says Agnes to Young James who is circling her and the baby, pretending that they hold no interest for him.

    Agnes is thinking it would serve him right, the fellow who never even took his leave of her. But she has to hope he will show up sometime and see her married to his brother. So that he will wonder. Also he will understand that in the end he did not get the better of her.
    Mary wonders how her father can talk in that way, about how wild animals could have eaten his own son. Is that how the sorrows of the years take hold on you, to turn your heart of flesh to a heart of stone, as it says in the old song? And if it is so, how carelessly and disdainfully might he talk about her, who never meant to him a fraction of what the boys did?

    Somebody has brought a fiddle on to the deck and is tuning up to play. People who have been hanging onto the rail and pointing out to each other what any one of them could see on their own-likewise repeating the name that by now everyone knows, Nova Scotia-are distracted by these sounds and begin to call for dancing. They call out the names of the reels and dances they want the fiddler to play. Space is cleared and couples line up in some sort of order and after a lot of uneasy fiddle-scraping and impatient shouts of encouragement, the music comes through and gathers its authority and the dancing begins.
    Dancing, at seven o’clock in the morning.
    Andrew comes up from below, bearing their supply of water. He stands and watches for a little, then surprises Mary by asking, would she dance?
    “Who will look after the boy?” says Agnes immediately. “I am not going to get up and chase him.” She is fond of dancing, but is prevented now, not only by the nursing baby but by the soreness of the parts of her body that were so battered in the birth.

    Mary is already refusing, saying she cannot go, but Andrew says, “We will put