Yes, and all things of the ocean that he has ever seen or read about appeal to Kep. Realities, I mean. He thinks himself a man, and would be ashamed to recite "The boy stood on the burning deck." That was sheer nonsense. Why could he not have leapt into the blue bosom of kindly Mother Ocean? That is what Kep would have done. Some of the folk lore of the sea, however, still enamoured him. He wanted to believe, or liked to believe, there were real mermaids and sirens also, that sung by night on the rocks of fairy islands to lure the unsuspecting mariners to their doom.
But there were real sea-poems, that night after night in his turret chamber among the elm trees he loved to fall asleep thinking about.
Well for Kep Drummond, I ween, that he had such little sea-poems to call upon, especially during the long dark nights of winter, for he was a somewhat excitable brainful boy. His chamber was an eerie one, but he had chosen it himself chiefly for that very eerieness. After bidding his father good-night and kissing Madge, his sister, and her pet Newfoundland, Bounder, he had to climb high, high up the winding stone stairs. There was said to be a ghost at Martello Castle, as the place was called, and if by any chance you had met the pensive dark-eyed boy, candle in hand, in the narrow stairway, you might have been somewhat startled.
The room itself was not large, and it was round. Kep's hammock was slung at one end near to two long narrow windows, and in winter time the leafless fingers of the elm-trees had an uncanny way of tapping on the panes. There were no blinds to these windows, because the boy liked to see out when skies were clear and stars shone, or the moon glinted laughingly through the branches.
One night as Kep was going to bed he met old Elspet coming down. A faithful old retainer she, but to-night her eyes were round and glassy, and the very flaps of her mob-cap seemed to have been stiffened with fear.
"Go not up, Keppie, darling; there is that in your room no boy should see!"
"Oh, if it is the ghost," cried Kep, "here's a boy who does want to see it, badly."
She tried to hold him. "It was a white face glaring in through the black, dark window!" she hissed. But Kep was off. She might as well have tried to restrain an eel.
The window was dark certainly, and yonder sure enough was the white face.
No ghost though, only the wondering eyes of a great white owl that often came to see the boy, for he laid up a little store of meat for this strange visitor, and sometimes a dead mouse or rat.