The View from Castle Rock Read Free Page A

but not quite the words.
    So he follows faster and faster and finally he takes to a run, to catch up to them, but no matter how fast he runs he cannot do that—though they are not hurrying at all, they are still just dawdling. And so busy he is, thinking about catching up to them, that it does not occur to him for some while that they are not going homeward at all.
    They are not going down the valley but up a narrow kind of little side valley with a trickle of a creek in it that flows down into the Ettrick. And with the light fading they seem to be getting dimmer but more numerous, a strange thing.
    And down from the hills comes a cold draught of air though it is a warm summer evening.
    And Will knows it then. These are no neighbor folk. And they are not leading him on to any place where he would want to go. And hard as he had run after them before, he turns now and runs the other way. This being an ordinary night and not All Hallows’ Eve they have no powers to chase him. His fear is different from the fear he felt the other time, but just as cold, because of the notion he has that they are ghosts of humans bewitched into fairies.
             
    It would be a mistake to think that everybody believed these stories. There was the brandy factor. But most people, believing or not, would hear them with more than a mild shiver. They might feel some curiosity, and some skepticism, but mostly a large portion of plain dread. Fairies and ghosts and religion were never mixed up together under some benign designation (
spiritual powers?
) as they often are today. Fairies were not blithe and captivating. They belonged to the olden times, not the old historical times of Flodden where every Selkirk man was killed except the one who brought the news, or of the lawless men raiding by night across the Debatable Lands, or of Queen Mary—or even of the times before that, of William Wallace or Archibald Bell-the-Cat or the Maid of Norway, but the truly dark times, before the Antonine Wall and before the first Christian missionaries came across the sea from Ireland. They belonged to times of bad powers and evil confusion, and their attentions were oftener than not malicious, or even deadly.
    Thomas Boston
    As a Testament of Esteem for the Reverend Thomas Boston Senior whose private character was highly respectable, whose public labours were blessed to many and whose writings have contributed much to promote the advancement of vital Christianity. This monument erected by a religious and grateful public.

    Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and will not be able.
    Luke xi11, 24.
    Will’s sightings would certainly not stand well with the Kirk, and during the first part of the eighteenth century the Kirk was particularly powerful in the parish of Ettrick.
    Its minister at that time was the preacher named Thomas Boston, who is remembered now—if he is remembered at all—as the author of a book called
Human Nature in its Fourfold State,
which was said to stand next to the Bible on the shelf of every pious home in Scotland. And every Presbyterian home in Scotland was meant to be a pious home. Constant investigation of private life and tortured reshapings of the faith went on to take care of that. There was no balm of ritual, no elegance of ceremony. Prayer was not only formal but personal, agonized. The readiness of the soul for eternal life was always in doubt and danger.
    Thomas Boston kept this drama going without a break, for himself and for his parishioners. In his autobiography he speaks of his own recurring miseries, his dry spells, his sense of unworthiness and dullness even in the act of preaching the Gospel, or while praying in his study. He pleads for grace. He bares his breast to Heaven—at least symbolically—in his desperation. He would surely lacerate himself with thorned whips if such behavior would not be Popish, would not in fact constitute a further sin.
    Sometimes God