LITMIR.BIZ

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in the middle of which is a lighthouse. A heavy

      sea-wall runs along outside of it. On the near side, the sea-wall

      59

      60 Dracula

      makes an elbow crooked inversely, and its end too has a light-

      house. Between the two piers there is a narrow opening into the

      harbour, which then suddenly widens.

      It is nice at high water; but when the tide is out it shoals

      away to nothing, and there is merely the stream of the Esk,

      running between banks of sand, with rocks here and there.

      Outside the harbour on this side there rises for about half a

      mile a great reef, the sharp edge of which runs straight out

      from behind the south lighthouse. At the end of it is a buoy

      with a bell, which swings in bad weather, and sends in a mourn-

      ful sound on the wind. They have a legend here that when a ship

      is lost bells are heard out at sea. I must ask the old man about

      this; he is coming this way….

      He is a funny old man. He must be awfully old, for his face is

      all gnarled and twisted like the bark of a tree. He tells me that he

      is nearly a hundred, and that he was a sailor in the Greenland

      fishing fleet when Waterloo was fought. He is, I am afraid, a very

      sceptical person, for when I asked him about the bells at sea and

      the White Lady at the abbey he said very brusquely:

      «I wouldn’t fash maseP about them, miss. Them things be

      all wore out. Mind, I don’t say that they never was, but I do say

      that they wasn’t in my time. They be all very well for comers and

      trippers, an’ the like, but not for a nice young lady like you. Them

      feet-folks from York and -Leeds that be always eatin’ cured

      herrin’s an’ drinkin’ tea an’ lookin’ out to buy cheap jet would

      creed aught. I wonder masel’ who’d be bothered tellin’ lies to

      them even the newspapers, which is full of fool- talk.» I thought

      he would be a good person to learn interesting things from, so I

      asked him if he would mind telling me something about the

      whale-fishing in the old days. He was just settling himself to

      begin when the clock struck six, whereupon he laboured to get up,

      and said:

      «I must gang ageeanwards home now, miss. My grand-

      daughter doesn’t like to be kept waitin’ when the tea is ready,

      for it takes me time to crammle aboon the grees, for there be a

      many of ’em; an’, miss, I lack belly- timber sairly by the clock.»

      He hobbled away, and I could see him hurrying, as well as he

      could, down the steps. The steps are a great feature on the place.

      They lead from the town up to the church, there are hundreds of

      them I do not know how many and they wind up in a delicate

      curve; the slope is so gentle that a horse could easily walk up

      and down them. I think they must originally have had some-

      thing to do with the abbey. I shall go home too. Lucy went out

      Mina Murray’s Journal 61

      visiting with her mother, and as they were only duty calls, I did

      not go. They will be home by this.

      i August. I came up here an hour ago with Lucy, and we had

      a most interesting talk with my old friend and the two others

      who always come and join him. He is evidently the Sir Oracle

      of them, and I should think must have been in his time a most

      dictatorial person. He will not admit anything, and downfaces

      everybody. If he can’t out-argue them he bullies them, and then

      takes their silence for agreement with his views. Lucy was looking

      sweetly pretty in her white lawn frock; she has got a beautiful

      colour since she has been here. I noticed that the old men did not

      lose any tune in coming up and sitting near her when we sat

      down. She is so sweet with old people; I think they all fell in love

      with her on the spot. Even my old man succumbed and did not

      contradict her, but gave me. double share instead. I got him on

      the subject of the legends, and he went off at once into a sort of

      sermon. I must try to remember it and put it down:

      «It be all fool-talk, lock, stock, and barrel; that’s what it be,

      an’ nowt else. These bans an 7 wafts an’ boh-ghosts an’ barguests

      an’ bogles an’ all anent them is only fit to set bairns an’ dizzy

      women a-belderin’. They be nowt but air-blebs. They, an’ all

      grims an’ signs an’ warnin’s, be all invented by parsons an’ illsome

      beuk-bodies an’ railway touters to skeer an’ scunner hafflin’s, an’

      to get folks to do somethin’ that they don’t other incline to. It

      makes me ireful to think o j them. Why, it’s them that, not

      content with printin’ lies on paper an’ preachin’ them out of

      pulpits, does want to be cuttin’ them on the tombstones. Look

      here all around you in what airt ye will; all them steans, holdin’

      up their heads as well as they can out of their pride, is acant

      simply tumblin’ down with the weight o’ the lies wrote on them,

      «Here lies the body’ or «Sacred to the memory’ wrote on all of

      them, an’ yet in nigh half of them there bean’t no bodies at all;

      an’ the memories of them bean’t cared a pinch of snuff about,

      much less sacred. Lies all of them, nothin’ but lies of one kind or

      another! My gog, but it’ll be a quare scowderrnent at the Day

      of Judgment when they come tumblin’ up hi their death-sarks,

      all jouped together an’ tryin’ to drag their tombsteans with them

      to prove how good they was; some of them trimrnlin’ and

      ditherin’, with their hands that dozzened an’ slippy from lyin 7

      in the sea that they can’t even keep their grup o’ them.»

      I could see from the old fellow’s self-satisfied air and

      the way in which he looked round for the approval of his cronies

      62 Dracula

      that he was «showing off,» so I put in a word to keep him

      going:

      «Oh,

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