The daft days

CHAPTER XV. CHAPTER XV. Suddenly all the town began to talk of the pride of Kate MacNeill.  She took to wearing all her best on week-days; abandoned the kitchen window, and ruined an old-established trade in pay-night sweeties, that used to shower on her in threepenny packets at the start of every autumn when the days grew short.  No longer blate young lads scraped with their feet uneasily in the sawdust of P. & A MacGlashan’s, swithering between the genteel attractions of Turkish Delight and the eloquence of conversation lozenges, that saved a lot of thinking, and made the blatest equal with the boldest when it came to tender badinage below the lamp at the back-door close with Dyce’s maid.  Talk about the repartee of salons! wit moves deliberately there compared with the swift giff-gaff that Kate and her lads were used to maintain with sentiments doubly sweet and ready-made at threepence the quarter-pound.  So fast the sweeties passed, like the thrust and riposte of rapiers, that their final purpose was forgotten; they were sweeties no longer to be eaten, but scented billets-doux, laconic of course, but otherwise just as satisfactory as those that high-born maidens get only one at a time and at long intervals when their papas are out at business. “Are you engaged?” “Just keep spierin’.” “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” “You are a gay deceiver.” “My heart is yours.” “How are your poor feet?” By the hour could Kate sustain such sparkling flirtations, or at least till a “Kiss me, dearest” turned up from the bottom of the poke, and then she slapped his face for him.  It is the only answer out in Colonsay unless he’s your intended. But it stopped all at once.  P. & A. was beat to understand what way his pay-night drawings fell, until he saw that all the lads were taking the other side of the street.  “That’s her off, anyway!” said he to Mrs P. & A., with a gloomy visage.  “I wonder who’s the lucky man?  It’s maybe Peter,—she’ll no’ get mony losengers from him.” And it was not only the decline in votive offerings that showed the vital change; she was not at the Masons’ ball, which shows how wrong was the thought of P. & A., for Peter was there with another lady.  Very cheery, too; exceedingly cheery, ah, desperately gay, but quite beyond the comprehension of his partner, Jenny Shand, who was unable to fathom why a spirit so merry in the hall should turn to groans and bitterness when, feeling a faintish turn, she got him in behind the draft-screen on the landing of the stair to sit the “Flowers o’ Edinburgh.”  He was fidging fain to tell her plainly what he thought of all her sex, but strove like a perfect gentleman against the inclination, and only said “Ha! ha! do you say so, noo?” and “Weemen!” with a voice that made them all out nothing more nor less than vipers.  Poor Jenny Shand! bonny Jenny Shand! what a shame she should be bothered with so ill-faured a fellow!  When she was picking bits of nothing off his coat lapel, as if he was her married man, and then coming to herself with a pretty start and begging pardon for her liberty, the diffy paid no heed; his mind was down the town, and he was seeing himself yesterday morning at the first delivery getting the window of Dyce’s kitchen banged in his face when he started to talk about soap, meaning to work the topic round to hands and gloves.  He had got the length of dirty hands, and asked the size of hers, when bang! the window went, and the Hielan’ one in among her pots and pans. It was not any wonder, for other lads as deliberate and gawky as himself had bothered her all the week with the same demand.  Hands! hands! you would think, said she, they were all at the door wi’ a bunch of finger-rings bound to marry her right or wrong, even if they had to put them on her nose.  Of course she knew finely what they were after—she knew that each blate wooer wanted a partner for the ball, and could only clench the compact with a pair of gloves; but just at present she was not in trim for balls, and landsmen had no interest for her since her heart was on the brine.  Some of them boldly guessed at seven-and-a-halfs without inquiry, and were dumfoundered that she would not look at them; and one had acquired a pair of roomy white cotton ones with elastic round the top—a kind of glove that plays a solemn part at burials, having come upon Miss Minto when her stock of festive kids was done.  They waylaid Kate coming with her basket from the mangle—no, thanky, she was needing no assistance; or she would find them scratching at the window after dark; or hear them whistling, whistling, whistling—oh, so softly!—in the close.  There are women rich and nobly born who think that they are fortunate, and yet, poor dears! they never heard the whistling in the close.  Kate’s case was terrible!  By day, in her walks abroad in her new merino, not standing so much as a wink, or paying any heed to a “Hey, Kate, what’s your hurry?” she would blast them with a flashing eye.  By night, hearing their signals, she showed them what she thought of them by putting to the shutters.  “Dir-r-rt!” was what she called them, with her nose held high and every “r” a rattle on the lug for them—this to Bud, who could not understand the new distaste Kate had to the other sex.  “Just dirt below my feet!  I think myself far far above them.” One evening Mr Dyce came in from his office and quizzed her in the lobby.  “Kate,” said he, “I’m not complaining, but I wish you would have mercy on my back-door.  There’s not a night I have come home of late but if I look up the close I find a lad or two trying to bite his way into you through the door.  Can you no’ go out, like a good lass, and talk at them in the Gaelic—it would serve them right!  If you don’t, steps will have to be taken with a strong hand, as you say yourself.  What are they wanting?  Bless my soul! can this—can this be love?” She ran to the sanctuary of the kitchen, plumped in a chair, and was swept away in a storm of laughter and tears that frightened Bud, who waited there a return of her aunts from the Women’s Guild.  “Why, Kate, what’s the matter?” she asked. “Your un—your un—un—uncle’s blaming me for harbouring all them chaps about the door, and says it’s l-l—love: oh dear! I’m black affronted.” “You needn’t go into hysterics about a little thing like that,” said Bud; “Uncle Dan’s tickled to death to see so many beaux you have, wanting you to that ball; he said last night he had to walk between so many of them waiting for you there in front, it was like shassaying up the middle in the Haymakers.” “It’s not hysterics, nor hersterics either,” said the maid; “and oh, I wish I was out of here and back in the isle of Colonsay!” Yes, Colonsay became a great place then.  America, where the prospects for domestics used to be so fascinating, had lost its glamour since Bud had told her the servants there were as discontented as in Scotland, and now her native isle beat Paradise.  She would talk by the hour, at a washing, of its charms, of which the greatest seemed to be the absence of public lamps and the way you heard the wind!  Colonsay seemed to be a place where folk were always happy, meeting in each other’s houses, dancing, singing, courting, marrying, getting money every now and then from sons or wealthy cousins in Australia.  Bud wondered if they never did any work in Colonsay.  Yes, yes, indeed! Kate could assure her, they worked quite often out in Colonsay—in the winter time. But one thing greatly troubled her—she must write back at once to the only Charles, who so marvellously had come to her through Bud’s unconscious offices, and she knew she could never sustain the standard of hand-write, spelling, and information Bud had established in her first epistle.  Her position was lamentable.  It was all very well to be the haughty madam on the street, and show herself a wise-like modest gyurl, but what was that without the education?  C. Maclean was a man of education—he got it on the yats among the gentry, he had travelled all the world! Kate’s new airs, that caused such speculation in the town, were—now let me tell you—all the result of a dash at education.  She wanted to be able to write a letter as good as Bud in a week or two, and had engaged the child to tutor her. Bud never found a more delicious game in all her life, and it hurried her convalescence, for to play it properly she must be Aunt Ailie, and Aunt Ailie was always so strong and well. “Education,” said Bud, who had a marvellous memory, and was now, you will notice, Ailie Dyce, sitting on a high chair, with the maid on a stool before her,—“education is not what a lot of sillies think it is; it isn’t knowing everything.  Lots try for it that way, and if they don’t die young, just when they’re going to win the bursary, they grow up horrid bores, that nobody asks to picnics.  You can’t know everything, not if you sit up cramming till the cows come home; and if you want to see a brainy person jump, ask him how his mother raised her dough.  Miss Katherine MacNeill, never— NEVER —NEVER be ashamed of not knowing a thing, but always be ashamed of not wanting to know.  That’s Part One.  Don’t you think you should have an exercise-book, child, and take it down?” “Toots! what’s my head for?” said the servant “Uncle Dan says education is knowing what you don’t know, and knowing where to find it out without the other people knowing; but he says in most places you can get the name of having it fine and good by talking loud and pushing all your goods in front of you in a big enough barrow.  And Auntie Bell—she says the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and the rest of it is what she skipped at Barbara Mushet’s Seminary.  But I tell you, child (said the echo of Ailie Dyce), that education’s just another name for love.” “My stars!  I never knew that before,” cried the servant; “I’m awful glad about Charles!” “It isn’t that kind of love,” Bud hurriedly explained, “though it’s good enough, for that’s too easy.  You’re only on the trail for education when you love things so you’ve simply got to learn as much as is good for your health about them.  Everything’s sweet—oh, so sweet—all the different countries, and the different people, when you understand, and the woods, and the things in them, and all the animals,—’cepting maybe puddocks, though it’s likely God made them too when He was kind of careless,—and the stars, and the things men did, and women,—’specially those that’s dead, poor dears!—and all the books, ’cepting the stupid ones Aunt Ailie simply can’t stand, though she never lets on to the ladies who like that kind.” “My Lord! must you love them all?” asked the maid, astonished. “Yes, you must, my Lord,” said Bud.  “You’ll never know the least thing well in this world unless you love it.  It’s sometimes mighty hard, I allow.  I hated the multiplication table, but now I love it—at least, I kind of love it up to seven times nine, and then it’s almost horrid, but not so horrid as it was before I knew that I would never have got to this place from Chicago unless a lot of men had learned the table up as far as twelve times twelve.” “I’m not particular about the multiplication table,” said the maid, “but I want to be truly refined, the same as you said in yon letter to Charles.  I know he’ll be expecting it.” “H-m-m-m-m!” said Bud thoughtfully, “I s’pose I’ll have to ask Auntie Ailie about that, for I declare to goodness I don’t know where you get it, for it’s not in any of the books I’ve seen.  She says it’s the One Thing in a lady, and it grows inside you someway, like—like—like your lungs, I guess.  It’s no use trying to stick it on outside with lessons on the piano or the mandoline, and parlour talk about poetry, and speaking mim as if you had a clothes-pin in your mouth, and couldn’t say the least wee thing funny without it was a bit you’d see in ‘Life and Work.’  Refinement, some folk think, is not laughing right out.” “My stars!” said Kate. “And Auntie Bell says a lot think it’s not knowing any Scotch language and pretending you never took a tousy tea.” “I think,” said Kate, “we’ll never mind refining; it’s an awful bother.” “But every lady must be refined,” said Bud.  “Ailie prosists in that.” “I don’t care,” said the maid; “I’m not particular about being very much of a lady,—I’ll maybe never have the jewellery for it,—but I would like to be a sort of lady on the Sundays, when Charles is at home.  I’m not hurryin’ you, my dear, but—but when do we start the writin’?” and she yawned in a way that said little for the interest of Professor Bud’s opening lecture. Whereupon Bud explained that in a systematic course of education reading came first, and the best reading was Shakespeare, who was truly ennobling to the human mind.  She brought in Auntie Ailie’s Shakespeare, and sat upon the fender, and plunged Kate at once into some queer society at Elsinore.  But, bless you! nothing came of it: Kate fell asleep, and woke to find the fire cold and the child entranced with Hamlet. “Oh dear! it’s a slow job getting your education,” she said pitifully, “and all this time there’s my dear Charles waiting for a letter!” CHAPTER XVI. “I canna be bothered with that Shakespeare,” Kate cried hopelessly, after many days of him; “the man’s a mournin’ thing!  Could he not give us something cheery, with ‘Come, all ye boys!’ in it, the same as the trawlers sing in Colonsay?  There was far more fun last week in the penny Horner.” So Bud dipped in the bottomless well of knowledge again and scooped up Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury,’ and splashed her favourite lyrics at the servant’s feet.  Kate could not stand the ‘Golden Treasury’ either; the songs were nearly all so lamentable they would make a body greet.  Bud assured her on the best authority that the sweetest songs were those that told of saddest thought, but Kate said that might be right enough for gentry who had no real troubles of their own, but they weren’t the thing at all for working folk.  What working folk required were songs with tunes to them, and choruses that you could tramp time to with your feet.  History, too, was as little to her taste; it was all incredible,—the country could never have kept up so many kings and queens.  But she liked geography, for the map enabled her to keep an eye on Charles as he went from port to port, where letters in her name, but still the work of Lennox, would be waiting for him. The scheme of education was maintained so long because the town had come upon its melancholy days and Bud began to feel depression, so that playing teacher was her only joy.  The strangers had gone south with the swallows; the steamer no longer called each day to make the pavement noisy in the afternoon with the skliff of city feet, so different from the customary tread of tackety boots; the coachman’s horn, departing, no longer sounded down the valley like a brassy challenge from the wide, wide world.  Peace came to the burgh like a swoon, and all its days were pensive.  Folk went about their tasks reluctant, the very smoke of the chimneys loitered lazily round the ridges where the starlings chattered, and a haze was almost ever over the hills.  When it rose, sometimes, Bud, from her attic window, could see the road that wound through the distant glen.  The road!—the road!—ah, that began to have a meaning and a kind of cry, and wishfully she looked at it and thought upon its other end, where the life she had left and read about was loudly humming and marvellous things were being done.  Charles Maclean of Oronsay, second mate, whom she loved unto destruction, now that he was writing regularly, fairly daft himself to get such charming curious letters as he thought from Kate, had been adjusted by the doctor, and was once again on the heaving main.  It would be Cardiff or Fleetwood, Hamburg, Santander, or Bilbao, whose very name is like a story, and his tarry pen, infected by the child’s example, induced to emulation, always bravely sought to give some picture of the varied world through which he wandered.  Of noisy ports did he communicate, crowded with ships, of streets and lofty warehouses, and places where men sang, and sometimes of the playhouse, where the villain was a bad one and the women were so braw. “What is braw?” asked Bud. “It’s fine clothes,” said Kate; “but what’s fine clothes if you are not pure in heart and have a figure?” and she surveyed with satisfaction her own plump arms. But the child guessed at a wider meaning for the word as Charles used it, and thought upon the beauteous clever women of the plays that she had seen herself in far Chicago, and since her vicarious lover would have thought them braw and plainly interesting, she longed to emulate them, at least to see them again.  And, oh! to see the places that he wrote of, and hear the thundering wheels and jangling bells!  And there was also Auntie Ailie’s constant stimulus to thoughts and aspirations that could meet no satisfaction in this little town.  Bell dwelt continually within the narrow walls of her immediate duty, content, like many, thank the Lord! doing her daily turns as best she could, dreaming of nothing nobler.  Dan had ranged wider in his time, and knew the world a great deal better, and had seen so much of it was illusion, its prizes “Will-o’-the-wisp,” that now his wild geese were come home.  He could see the world in the looking-glass in which he shaved, and there was much to be amused at.  But Ailie’s geese were still flying far across the firmament, knowing no place of rest.  The child had bewitched her! it was often the distant view for her now, the region unattainable; and though apparently she had long ago surrendered to her circumstances, she now would sometimes silently irk at her prisoning here, in sleep-town, where we let things slide until to-morrow, while the wild birds of her inclination flew around the habitable wakeful world.  Unwittingly—no, not unwittingly always—she charged the child with curiosity unsatisfiable, and secret discontent at little things and narrow, with longings for spacious arenas and ecstatic crowded hours.  To be clever, to be brave and daring, to venture and make a glorious name!—how her face would glow and all her flesh would quiver picturing lives she would have liked to live if only she had had the chance!  How many women are like that! silent by the hearth, seemingly placid and content as they darn and mend and wait on the whim and call of dullards. Bell might be content and busy with small affairs, but she had a quick, shrewd eye, and saw the child’s unrest.  It brought her real distress, for so had the roving spirit started in her brother William.  Sometimes she softly scolded Lennox, and even had contemplated turning her into some other room from the attic that had the only window in the house from which the highroad could be seen, but Ailie told her that would be to make the road more interesting for the child.  “And I don’t know,” she added, “that it should worry us if she does indulge herself in dreams about the great big world and its possibilities.  I suppose she’ll have to take the road some day.” “Take the road!” cried Bell, almost weeping.  “Are you daft, Ailie Dyce?  What need she take the road for?  There’s plenty to do here, and I’m sure she’ll never be better off anywhere else.  A lot of nonsense!  I hope you are not putting notions in her head; we had plenty of trouble with her father.” “It would break my heart to lose her, I assure you,” said Aunt Ailie softly; “but—” and she ended with a sigh. “I’m sure you’re content enough yourself?” said Bell; “and you’re not by any means a diffy.” “Indeed I am content,” admitted Ailie; “at least—at least I’m not complaining.  But there is a discontent that’s almost holy, a roving mood that’s the salvation of the race.  There were, you mind, the Pilgrim Fathers—” “I wish to the Lord they had bided at home!” cried Bell.  “There’s never been happy homes in this Christian land since they started emigration.”  And at that Miss Ailie smiled and Dan began to chuckle. “Does it not occur to you, Bell,” said he, “that but for the Pilgrim Fathers there would never have been Bud?” “I declare neither there would!” she said, smiling.  “Perhaps it was as well they went, poor things!  And, of course, there must be many an honest decent body in America.” “Quite a number!” said Ailie.  “You would not expect this burgh to hold them all, or even Scotland: America’s glad to get the overflow.” “Ah, you’re trying to make me laugh, the pair of you, and forget my argument,” said Bell; “but I’ll not be carried away this time.  I’m feared for the bairn, and that’s telling you.  Oh, Ailie, mind what her mother was—poor girl! poor dear girl! playacting for her living, roving from place to place, with nothing you could call a home; laughing and greeting and posturing before lights for the diversion of the world—” “We might do worse than give the world diversion,” said Ailie soberly. “Yes, yes; but with a painted face and all a vain profession—that is different, is it not?  I love a jovial heart like Dan’s, but to make the body just a kind of fiddle!  It’s only in the body we can be ourselves—it is our only home; think of furnishing it with shams, and lighting every room that should be private, and leaving up the blinds that the world may look in at a penny a-head!  How often have I thought of William, weeping for a living, as he had to do sometimes, no doubt, and wondered what was left for him to do to ease his grief when Mary died.  Oh, curb the child, Ailie! curb the dear wee lassie,—it’s you it all depends on; she worships you; the making of her ’s in your hands.  Keep her humble.  Keep her from thinking of worldly glories.  Teach her to number her days, that she may apply her heart unto wisdom.  Her mind’s too often out of here and wandering elsewhere: it was so with William,—it was once the same with you.” Indeed it was no wonder that Bud’s mind should wander elsewhere, since the life about her had grown so suddenly dull.  In these days Wanton Wully often let his morning sleep too long possess him, and hurrying through the deserted dawn with his breeches scarcely on, would ring the bell in a hasty fury half an hour behind the proper time.  But a little lateness did not matter in a town that really never woke.  Men went to work in what we call a dover—that is, half asleep; shopkeepers came blinking drowsily down and took their shutters off, and went back to breakfast, or, I fear sometimes, to bed, and when the day was aired and decency demanded that they should make some pretence at business, they stood by the hour at their shop doors looking at the sparrows, wagtails, and blue-bonnets pecking in the street, or at the gulls that quarrelled in the syver sand.  Nothing doing.  Two or three times a-day a cart from the country rumbled down the town, breaking the Sabbath calm; and on one memorable afternoon there came a dark Italian with an organ who must have thought that this at last was Eldorado, so great was his reward from a community sick of looking at each other.  But otherwise nothing doing, not a thing!  As in the dark of the fabled underland the men who are blind are kings, George Jordon, the silly man, who never had a purpose, and carried about with him an enviable eternal dream, seemed in that listless world the only wide-awake, for he at least kept moving, slouching somewhere, sure there was work for him to do if only he could get at it.  Bairns dawdled to the schools, dogs slept in the track where once was summer traffic; Kate, melancholy, billowed from the kitchen window, and into the street quite shamelessly sang sad old Gaelic songs which Mr Dyce would say would have been excellent if only they were put to music, and her voice was like a lullaby. One day Bud saw great bands of countless birds depart, passing above the highroad, and standing in the withering garden heard as it were without a breath of wind the dry rattle of dead leaves fall.  It frightened her.  She came quickly in to the tea-table, almost at her tears. “Oh, it’s dre’ffle,” she said.  “It’s Sunday all the time, without good clothes and the gigot of mutton for dinner.  I declare I want to yell.” “Dear me!” said Miss Bell cheerfully, “I was just thinking things were unusually lively for the time of year.  There’s something startling every other day.  Aggie Williams found her fine new kitchen-range too big for the accommodation, and she has covered it with cretonne and made it into a what-not for her parlour.  Then there’s the cantata—I hear the U.P. choir is going to start to practise it whenever Duncan Gill, next door to the hall, is gone: he’s near his end, poor body! they’re waiting on, but he says he could never die a Christian death if he had to listen to them at their operatics through the wall.” “It’s not a bit like this in Chicago,” said the child, and her uncle chuckled. “I daresay not,” said he.  “What a pity for Chicago!  Are you wearying for Chicago, lassie?” “No,” said Bud, deliberating.  “It was pretty smelly, but my! I wish to goodness folk here had a little git-up-and-go to them!” “Indeed, I daresay it’s not a bit like Chicago,” admitted Auntie Bell.  “It pleases myself that it’s just like Bonnie Scotland.” “It’s not a bit like Scotland either,” said Bud.  “I calc’lated Scotland ’d be like a story-book all the time, chock-full of men-at-arms and Covenanters, and things father used to talk about, Sundays, when he was kind of mopish, and wanted to make me Scotch.  I’ve searched the woods for Covenanters and can’t find one; they must have taken to the tall timber, and I haven’t seen any men-at-arms since I landed, ’cepting the empty ones up in the castle lobby.” “What did you think Scotland would be like, dear?” asked Ailie. “Between me and Winifred Wallace, we figured it would be a great place for chivalry and constant trouble among the crowned heads.  I expected there’d be a lot of ‘battles long ago,’ same as in the Highland Reaper in the sweet, sweet G.T.” “What’s G.T.?” asked Auntie Bell; and Bud laughed slyly, and looked at her smiling Auntie Ailie, and said: “We know, Auntie Ailie, don’t we?  It’s GRAND!  And if you want to know, Auntie Bell, it’s just Mister Lovely Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury.’ That’s a book, my Lord!  I expected there’d be battles every day—” “What a bloodthirsty child!” said Miss Ailie. “I don’t mean truly truly battles,” Bud hurried to explain, “but the kind that’s the same as a sound of revelry off—no blood, but just a lot of bang.  But I s’pose battles are gone out, like iron suits.  Then I thought there’d be almost nothing but cataracts and ravines and—and—mountain-passes, and here and there a right smart Alick in short trunks and a feather in his hat, winding a hunting-horn.  I used to think, when I was a little, wee, silly whitterick, that you wound a horn every Saturday night with a key, just like a clock; but I’ve known for years and years it’s just blowing.  The way father said, and from the things I read, I calc’lated all the folk in Scotland ’d hate each other like poison, and start a clan, and go out chasing all the other clans with direful slogans and bagpipes skirling wildly in the genial breeze.  And the place would be crowded with lovelorn maidens—that kind with the starched millstones round their necks, like Queen Mary always wore.  My, it must have been rough on dear old Mary when she fell asleep in church!  But it’s not a bit like that; it’s only like Scotland when I’m in bed, and the wind is loud, and I hear the geese.  Then I think of the trees all standing out in the dark and wet, and the hills too, the way they’ve done for years and years, and the big lonely places with nobody in them, not a light even; and I get the croodles and the creeps, for that’s Scotland, full of bogies.  I think Scotland’s stone-dead.” “It’s no more dead than you are yourself,” said Miss Bell, determined ever to uphold her native land.  “The cleverest people in the world come from Scotland.” “So father used to say; but Jim, he said he guessed the cleverer they were the quicker they came.  I’m not a bit surprised they make a dash from home when they feel so dead and mopish and think of things and see that road.” “Road?” said Uncle Dan.  “What road?” “My road,” said the child.  “The one I see from my window: oh, how it rises and rises and winds and winds, and it just shrieks on you to come right along and try.” “Try what?” asked her uncle curiously. “I dunno,” said Bud, thinking hard; “Auntie Ailie knows, and I ’spect Auntie Bell knows too.  I can’t tell what it is, but I fairly tickle to take a walk along.  Other times I feel I’d be mighty afraid to go, but Auntie Ailie says you should always do the things you’re afraid to do, for they’re most always the only things worth doing.” Mr Dyce, scratching the ear of Footles, who begged at the side of his chair, looked over the rims of his glasses and scrutinised the child. “All roads,” said he, “as you’ll find a little later, come to the same dead end, and most of us, though we think we’re picking our way, are all the time at the mercy of the Schoolmaster, like Geordie Jordon.  The only thing that’s plain in the present issue is that we’re not brisk enough here for Young America.  What do you think we should do to make things lively?” “Hustle,” said Bud.  “Why, nobody here moves faster’n a funeral, and they ought to gallop if they want to keep up with the band.” “I’m not in a hurry myself,” said her uncle, smiling.  “Maybe that’s because I think I’m all the band there is, myself.  But if you want to introduce the Chicago system you should start with Mrs Wright’s Italian warehouse down the street,—the poor body’s losing money trying to run her shop on philanthropic principles.” Bud thought hard a while.  “Phil—phil—What’s a philanthropic principle?” she asked. “It’s a principle on which you don’t expect much interest except in another world,” said her uncle.  “The widow’s what they call a Pilgrim, hereabouts; if the meek were to inherit the earth in a literal sense, she would long ago have owned the whole county.” “A truly Christian woman!” said Miss Bell. “I’m not denying it,” said Mr Dyce; “but even a Christian woman should think sometimes of the claims of her creditors, and between ourselves it takes me all my time to keep the wholesale merchants from hauling her to court.” “How do you manage it?” asked Ailie, with a twinkle in her eyes; but Dan made no reply,—he coughed and cleaned his spectacles. CHAPTER XVII. There was joy a few days later in the Dyce’s kitchen when Peter the postman, with a snort that showed the bitterness of his feelings, passed through the window a parcel for Kate, that on the face of it had come from foreign parts.  “I don’t ken who it’s from, and ye’re no’ to think I’m askin’,” said he; “but the stamps alone for that thing must have cost a bonny penny.” “Did they, indeed!” said Kate, with a toss of her head.  “Ye’ll be glad to ken he can well afford it!” and she sniffed at the parcel, redolent of perfumes strange and strong. “Ye needna snap the nose off me,” said the postman, “I only made the remark.  What—what does the fellow do?” “He’s a traveller for railway tunnels,” retorted the maid of Colonsay, and shut the window with a bang, to tear open the parcel in a frenzy of expectation, and find a bottle of Genuine Riga Balsam—wonderful cure for sailors’ wounds!—another of Florida Water, and a silver locket, with a note from Charles saying the poem she had sent was truly grand, and wishing her many happy returns of the day.  Like many of Charles’s letters now, its meaning was, in parts, beyond her, until she could learn from Bud the nature of the one to which it was an answer,—for Bud was so far enraptured with the wandering sailor that she sometimes sent him letters which the servant never saw.  That day the breakfast service smelt of Florida Water, for Kate had drenched herself with the perfume, and Miss Bell was sure she had washed the dishes again with scented soap, as was the habit of the girl when first she came from Colonsay, and thought that nothing but Brown Windsor would do justice to Grandma Buntain’s tea-set used on Sundays.  But Bud could see the signs of Shipping Intelligence, and, as soon as she could, she hastened to the kitchen, for it was Saturday, and on Saturdays there were no lessons in the Dyce Academy.  Oh! how she and Kate fondled the bottles lovingly, and sniffed passionately at their contents, and took turn about of the locket!  The maid had but one regret, that she had no immediate use for Riga Balsam; but Bud was more devoted than that—she gently pricked the palm of her hand with a pin and applied the Genuine.  “Oh! how he must love me—us, I mean,” she exclaimed, and eagerly devoured his letter. “What did you say to him in the last?” asked Kate.  “He’s talking there about a poetry, and happy returns of the day.” Bud confessed she had made a poem for him from his beloved Kate, and had reckoned on fetching a gift of candy by telling him her birthday was on Monday.  “But really I’d just as lief have the balsam,” said she, “it’s perfectly lovely; how it nips!” “It’s not my birthday at all,” said Kate.  “My birthday’s always on the second Sunday in September.  I was born about the same time as Lady Anne—either a fortnight before or a fortnight after; I forget mysel’ completely which it was, and I daresay so does she.” “No, but Monday’s my birthday, right enough,” said Bud, “and seeing that we’re sort of loving him in company, I s’posed it would be all the same.” “So it is, I’m not complainin’,” said the maid.  “And now we’ll have to send him something back.  What would you recommend?” They considered many gifts appropriate for a sailor,—sou’-westers, Bible-markers, woollen comforters, and paper-knives, scarf-pins, gloves, and ties.  Bud was sure that nothing would delight him like a book about a desert island, but Kate said no, a pipe was just the very ticket—a wooden pipe with silver mountings; the very one to suit was in the window of Mrs Wright’s Italian warehouse. “What’s an Italian warehouse?” asked the child. “You have me there!” said Kate, “unless, maybe, her husband was Italian before he went and died on her.  ‘Italian Warehouse’ is the only thing that’s on her sign.  She sells a thing for almost any price you like to offer, because the Bible says it’s not the thing at all to argy-bargy.” “ I know,” said Bud; “it’s what we call running a business on—on—on philanthropic principles.  I’d love to see a body do it.  I’ll run out and buy the pipe from Mrs Wright, Kate.” She departed on her errand down the town, at the other side of the church; and the hours of the forenoon passed, and dinner-time was almost come, and still there was no sign of her returning.  Kate would have lost her patience and gone to seek for her, but found so much to interest at the window that she quite forgot her messenger.  Something out of the ordinary was happening on the other side of the church.  Wanton Wully knew what it was, but of course he was not telling, for he was out as public crier, rousing the town with his hand-bell, and shouting “Notice!” with an air that promised some tremendous tidings; but beyond mysterious words like “bed-rock prices,” which he mumbled from a paper in his hand, there was nothing to show this proclamation differed from the common ones regarding herring at the quay or a sale of delf down-by at John Turner’s corner.  “What are ye crying?” they asked him, but being a man with the belief that he had a voice as clear as a concert-singer, he would not condescend to tell them.  Only when some one looked across his shoulder and read the paper for himself was it found that a sale described as “Revolutionary” was taking place at the Italian warehouse.  Half the town at once went to see what the decent body was up to.  Kate saw them hurrying down, and when they came back they were laughing.  “What’s the ploy?” she asked a passer-by. “A sale at the Pilgrim weedow’s,” she was told.  “She’s put past her Spurgeon’s Sermons and got a book about business, and she’s learnin’ the way to keep an Italian warehoose in Scotch.” Kate would have been down the town at once to see this marvel for herself, but her pot was on the boil, and here was the mistress coming down the stair, crying “Lennox, Lennox!”  The maid’s heart sank.  She had forgotten Lennox, and how could she explain her absence to a lady so particular?  But for the moment she was spared the explanation, for the bark of Footles filled the street and Mr Dyce came into the lobby, laughing. “You’re very joco!” said his sister, helping him off with his coat.  “What are you laughing at?” “The drollest thing imaginable,” said he.  “I have just left Captain Consequence in a terrible rage about a letter that a boy has brought to him from Mrs Wright.  He’s one of the folk that boast of paying as they go but never make a start.  It seems he’s as much in debt to her as to most of the other merchants in the place, but wasn’t losing any sleep about it, for she’s such a softy.  This letter has given him a start.  He showed it to me, with the notion that it was a libel or a threat that might be actionable, but I assured him I couldn’t have written one more to the point myself.  It said that unless he paid at once, something would be apt to happen that would create him the utmost astonishment.” “Mercy on us!  That’s not very like the widow: she must be getting desperate.” “It was the wording of the thing amused me,” said Mr Dyce, walking into the parlour, still chuckling, “‘something will be apt to happen that will create you the utmost astonishment’—it suggests such awful possibilities.  And it’s going to serve it’s purpose too, for the Captain’s off to pay her, sure it means a scandal.” Kate took the chance to rush round the kirk in search of her messenger.  “This way for the big bargains!” cried some lads coming back from the Italian warehouse, or, “Hey! ye’ve missed a step”—which shows how funny we can be in the smallest burgh towns; but Kate said nothing, only “trash!” to herself in indignation, and tried by holding in her breath to keep from getting red. The shop of the Pilgrim widow suffered from its signboard, that was “far too big for its job, like the sweep that stuck in my granny’s chimney,” as Mr Dyce said.  Once the sign had been P. & A.’s, but P. & A.’s good lady tired of hearing her husband nicknamed the Italian, and it went back to the painter, who partly paid with it a debt to the Pilgrim widow, who long since rued her acquisition.  She felt in her soul it was a worldly vanity,—that a signboard less obtrusive on the public eye would more befit herself and her two meek little windows, where fly-papers, fancy goods, sweetmeats, cigarettes, country eggs, and cordial invitations to the Pilgrims Mission Bethel every Friday ( D. V. ), eight o’clock, kept each other incongruous and dusty company.  A decent pious widow, but ah! so wanting any saving sense of guile.  The Pilgrim Mission was the thing she really lived for, and her shop was the Cross she bore.  But to-day it was scarcely recognisable: the windows had been swept of their stale contents, and one was filled with piles of rosy apples, the other with nuts that poured in a tempting cataract from a cask upset with an air of reckless prodigality.  A large hand-lettered bill was in each window; one said— HALLOWE’EN!  ARISE AND SHINE! and the other— DO IT NOW! what was to be done being left to the imagination.  All forenoon there had been a steady flow of customers, who came out of the shop with more than nuts or apples, greatly amazed at the change in the Pilgrim widow, who was cracking up her goods like any common sinner.  Behind the railed and curtained box in which she was supposed to keep her books and pray for the whole community, there seemed to be some secret stimulating influence, for when bad payers tried to-day to get a thing on credit, and she was on the point of yielding, she would dart into the box and out again as hard as steel, insisting that at every Revolutionary Sale the terms were cash.  She was giving bargains, but at her own price, never at her customers’, as it used to be.  The Health Saline—extract of the finest fruit, Cooling, Refreshing, Invigorating, Tonic (though indeed it looked like an old friend from Rochelle with a dash of sugar and tartaric)—was down a ha’penny, to less than what it cost, according to another hand-done bill upon the counter.  When they asked her how she could afford to sell the stuff below its cost, she seemed ashamed and startled, till she had a moment in behind the curtains, and then she told them it was all because of the large turn-over; she could not afford to sell the saline under cost if she did not sell it in tremendous quantities. Did they want Ward’s Matchless Polishing Paste?—alas (after a dash behind the curtains) she was completely out of it.  Of late it had been in such great demand that she got tired of ordering it every other week wholesale.  Yes, she was out of Ward’s, but (again the curtained box) what about this wonderful line in calf-foot jelly, highly praised by the—by the connoisseurs?  What were connoisseurs?  A connoisseur (again on reference behind the curtains) was one of those wealthy men who could swallow anything. “I’ll tell ye what it is,” said the tailor, “I see’t at last!  She’s got a book in there; I’ve seen’t before—‘The Way to Conduct a Retail Business’—and when she runs behind, it’s to see what she should say to the customers.  That’s where she got the notions for her windows and the ‘Do it Now!’” But he was wrong—completely wrong, for when Kate came into the shop with “Have you seen Miss Lennox, Mrs Wright?  I sent her here a message hours ago,” Lennox herself came from the curtained box saying, “Hello, Kate; saw you first!  What can we do for you to-day?” “My stars! my lady, you’ll catch it!” said the maid.  “They’re waiting yonder on you for your dinner.” “I was just heading for home,” said Bud, making for the door. “My child! my child! my angel child!” cried the Pilgrim widow, going to kiss her, but Bud drew back. “Not to-day, please; I’m miles too big for kissing to-day,” said she, and marched solemnly out of the Italian warehouse. “What in the world were you doing away so long?” asked Kate.  “Were you carrying on at anything?” “I was paying for Charles’s pipe,” said the child, returning the money she had got for its purchase.  “That’s the sweetest lady, Mrs Wright, but my! ain’t she Baby Mine when it settles down to business?  When I wanted to buy the pipe, she was so tickled she wanted me to have it for nothing, seeing I was Mr Dyce’s niece.  She said Uncle Dan was a man of God who saved her more than once from bankruptcy, and it was a pretty old pipe anyway, that had been in the window since the time she got changed and dropped brocaded dolmans.  You’d think it made her ache to have folk come in her shop and spend money; I guess she was raised for use in a free soup-kitchen.  I said I’d take the pipe for nothing if she’d throw in a little game with it.  ‘What game?’ said she—oh, she’s a nice lady!— and I said I was just dying to have a try at keeping a really really shop, and would show her Chicago way. And you bet I did , Kate MacNeill !” She came in with the soup, but no question was put till her uncle asked the blessing, and then, before a spoon was lifted, Auntie Bell said, “Lassie, lassie, where in the world have you been?” “Keeping shop for Mrs Wright,” said Bud. “Tcht! tcht! you’re beyond redemption,” cried her aunt.  “A child like you keeping shop!” “A bonny pair of shopkeepers, the widow and you!  Which of you counted the change?” said Uncle Dan.  “Tell us all about it.” “Well, I had the loveliest time,” said Bud.  “It would take till tea-time to tell just ’zactly what a lovely day it was, but I’ll hurry up and make it a front scene.  What you said, Uncle Dan, about her running a shop on phil—on philanthropic principles made me keen to see her doing it, and I went down a message for Kate, and offered to help.  She ’lowed herself she wasn’t the best there was in the land at keeping shop, and didn’t seem to make much money at it, but said thank the Lord she had the priceless boon of health.  I was the first customer she’d set eyes on all the morning, ’cept a man that wanted change for half-a-crown and hadn’t the half-crown with him, but said he’d pay it when he didn’t see her again, and she said she felt sure that trade was going to take a turn.  I said I thought it would turn quicker if—if—if she gave it a push herself, and she said she dared say there was something in it, and hoped I was in the fold.  I said I was, sure, and at that she cried out ‘Hallelujah!’  Every other way she was a perfectly perfect lady; she made goo-goo eyes at me, and skipped round doing anything I told her.  First she cleared all the old truck out of the windows, and filled them up with nuts and apples for Hallowe’en, till they looked the way windows never looked in Scotland in all creation before, I s’pose.  ‘They’ll think it kind of daft,’ says she, scared-like, ‘they’re not like any other windows in the place.’  ‘Of course not,’ I said, ‘and that’s the very thing to jar the eye of the passer-by.’  Jim Molyneux said a shop-window was like a play-bill, it wanted a star line—a feature—a whoop.  Then I tried to think of the ’cute things shopkeepers print in Chicago, but couldn’t remember any ’cepting ‘Pants two dollars a leg, seats free,’ but the widow said she didn’t sell pants.  Then I thought of some natty little cards I’d seen that said ‘Arise and Shine!’ and ‘Do it Now!’ so I got her to print these words good and big, and put them in the window.  She wanted to know what they meant, but I said I couldn’t tell from Adam, but they would make the people wonder, and come in the shop to find out, and then it would be up to her to sell them something and pry the money out of them before they baulked.  Oh, Auntie, how I go on!” and here Bud stopped almost breathless and a little ashamed. “Go on! go on!” cried Ailie. “Well, I got behind a curtain into a little box-office, where the widow kept a cash-book awfully doggy-eared, and a pile of printed sermons, and heaps of tracts about doing to others as you should be done by, and giving to the poor and lending to the Lord.  She read bits of them to me, and said she sometimes wondered if Captain Brodie was too poor to pay for eighteen months’ tobacco, but she didn’t like to press him, seeing he had been in India and fought his country’s battles.  She said she felt she must write him again for her money, but couldn’t think of what to say that would be Christian and polite and gentle, but still make him see she wanted the money pretty bad.  I said I would tell her what to say that would suit just fine, and I dictated it—” “I saw the letter,” said Uncle Dan, twinkling through his glasses.  “It was a work of genius,—go on! go on!” “Then folk began to come in for nuts and apples, and asked what ‘Arise and Shine’ and ‘Do it Now’ meant.  She said they were messages from the angel of the Lord—meaning me, I s’pose,—though, goodness knows, I’m not much of an angel, am I, Auntie Bell?  Then the folk would fade away, looking a bit rattled, and come back in a while and ask the price of things.  She’d say she wasn’t sure, but she thought about a shilling, or maybe ninepence seeing they had a young family, and then they’d want the stuff on credit, and she’d yammer away to them till I got wild.  When they were gone I had a good heart-to-heart talk with her, and said phil—philanthropic principles were a great mistake in a small Italian warehouse, and that she ought to give the customers a chance of doing unto others as they would be done by.  She made more goo-goo eyes at me, and said I was a caution, sure enough, and perhaps I was right, for she had never looked at it that way before.  After that she spunked up wonderful.  I got her to send Mr Wanton through the town with his bell, saying there was everything you wanted at Mrs Wright’s at bed-rock prices; and when people came in after that and wanted to get things for nothing, or next to it, she’d pop into the box where I lay low, and ask me what she was to say next, and then skip out to them as sharp as a tack and show they needn’t try to toy with her.  She says she made more money to-day by my playing shop Chicago-way than she’d make in a week her own way.  Why, I’m talking, and talking, and talking, and my soup’s stone-cold!” “So’s mine,” said Uncle Dan, with a start. “And mine!” said Auntie Ailie, with a smile. “And mine too, I declare!” cried Miss Bell, with a laugh they all joined in, till Footles raised his voice protesting. CHAPTER XVIII. Yes , that was one bright day in the dismal season, the day she tutored the Pilgrim widow in the newer commerce.  There was a happy night to follow soon, and it is my grief that my pen cannot grasp the spirit of it, so that reading you would laugh with her and whiles be eerie.  ’Tis true, there was little in the thing itself, as in most that at the age of twelve impress us for all our lives, but it met in some degree the expectations that her father’s tales of Scotland had sent home with her.  Hitherto all had been natural and wellnigh commonplace that she had experienced, all except the folk so queer and kind and comical in a different way from those in Chicago, the sounds she could hear as she lay in her attic bed—the wind-call, and the honk of geese, and the feeling of an island hopelessly remote from the new bright world that best she knew,—remote and lost, a speck on the sea far, far from great America.  The last things vaguely troubled her.  For she was child enough as yet to shiver at things not touched by daylight nor seemingly made plain by the common-sense of man.  She could laugh at the ghosts that curdled the blood of the maid of Colonsay; and yet at times, by an effort of the will, she could feel all Kate’s terror at some manifestation no more alarming than the cheep of mice or a death-watch ticking in a corner cupboard.  These were but crude and vulgar fears, self-encouraged little actress terrors.  It took more than the hint of ghost or the menace of the ticking insect in the wood to wake in her the feeling of worlds unrealised, encompassing, that she could get from casual verses in her Auntie Ailie’s book of Scottish ballads, or find o’erwhelm her of a sudden on looking from her window into the garden bare and pallid below the moon. This night there should be moon according to the penny almanac, and Wanton Wully lit no lamps, but went home for a good sleep to himself, as his saying went, and left the burgh to such illumination as should come to it by the caprice of the clouds.  It lay, the little place, for most of the night in darkness: a mirk so measureless deep, when the shops were shut, that the red-lit skylight windows at the upper end of the town seemed by some miracle to lift themselves and soar into the heavens—square, monstrous flitting stars to the vision of Bud, as she stood with Auntie Ailie at the door watching for Uncle Dan’s return from his office.  To bring the soaring windows back to their natural situation, she had to stand a little way inside the lobby and establish their customary place against the darkness by the lintel of the door. From the other side of the church came a sound of dull monotonous drumming—no cheerful rhythmic beat like the drumming of John Taggart, but a mournful thumping, fitful in flaws of the bland night wind. “What’s that, Auntie?” she asked. “The guizards,” said Miss Ailie, looking down upon her in the lobby light with a smile she could not see.  “Did you never hear of the guizards, Bud?” Bud had never heard of the guizards; that was one thing, surely, her father had forgotten.  She had heard of Hallowe’en, she said, when further questioned.  Wasn’t it the night for ducking into tubs for apples?  The Pilgrim widow had told her Hallowe’en was coming, and it was for Hallowe’en she had sold so many nuts and apples; but the widow said she felt ashamed to do it, for Hallowe’en was not approved of by the Mission, being idolatrous and gay.  “Is it very gay?” asked Bud anxiously. “So I used to think it,” said her aunt. “Then I s’pose it must be wicked,” said the child regretfully.  “I’d have expected you’d have Hallowe’en night here in the house if it hadn’t been very bad.  That widow did me a lot of good, showing me what a heap of happy things are full of sin.  She knew them all!  I s’pose she got them in the tracts.  Yes, she did me a lot of good; I—I almost wish I hadn’t met that widow.” “Do you feel wicked when you’re gay?” asked Miss Ailie. “Mercy on us! not a mite!” said Bud.  “I feel plumb full of goodness when I’m gay; but that’s my youth and innocence.  The widow says it is, and I guess what she says goes.” “Still, do you know, my dear, I’d risk a little gaiety now and then,” said Auntie Ailie.  “Who knows?  The widow, though a worthy lady, is what in Scotland we call an auld wife, and it’s generally admitted that auld wives of either sex have no monopoly of wisdom.  If you’re wanting pious guidance, Bud, I don’t know where you’ll get it better than from Auntie Bell; and she fairly dotes on Hallowe’en and the guizards.  By-and-by you’ll see the guizards, and—and—well, just wait and we’ll find what else is to be seen.  I do wish your Uncle Dan would hurry.” The street was quite deserted, but did not show its vacancy until the clouds for a moment drifted off the moon that rolled behind the steeple.  Then the long grey stretch of tenements came out unreal and pale on the other side of the street, their eaves and chimneys throwing inky shadows, their red-lit windows growing of a sudden wan.  Over them hung the ponderous kirk, the master shadow, and all—the white-harled walls, the orange windows, the glittering cold and empty street—seemed like the vision of a dream.  Then the clouds wrapped up the moon again, and the black was the black of Erebus.  But as it fell, the dull drums seemed to come nearer, and from the head of the street, the windy corner where Uncle Dan had his office, small moons came, purple and golden, fantastically carved.  They ran from house to house, and grouped in galaxies, or singly fell apart, swinging and giddy orbs.  For a moment Bud looked at them bewildered, then gave a happy scream. “The lanterns! the lanterns! look at the lanterns, Auntie.  Is that Hallowe’en?” “That’s part of it, at least,” said her Aunt.  “These are the guizards with their turnip lanterns; they’re going round the houses singing; by-and-by we’ll hear them.” “My! I wish to goodness I had a lantern like that.  To swing a lantern like that ’d feel like being a lighthouse or the statue of Liberty at New York.  I’d rather have a turnip lantern than a raft of dolls.” “Did you never have one?” “No,” said Bud sorrowfully.  “You have no idea what a poor mean place Chicago is—not a thing but common electric light!” and Miss Ailie smiled gleefully to herself again like one possessed of a lovely secret.  “I wish that brother of mine would come quickly,” she said, and at the moment he came out of the darkness to them with a comical look of embarrassment in his face and in his hand an unlighted turnip lantern! “Here, Bud,” said he, “take this, quickly, before some silly body sees me with it and thinks it’s for myself.  I have the name, I know, of being daft enough already, and if it gets about the country that Daniel Dyce was going round at Hallowe’en with a turnip lantern, they would think he had lost his head in a double sense and it would be very bad for business.” “Uncle!” cried the child in ecstasy, “you’re the loveliest, sweetest man in the whole wide world.” “I daresay,” said he.  “I have been much admired when I was younger.  But in this case don’t blame me.  I wash my hands of the responsibility.  I got my orders for that thing from your Auntie Bell.” “My! ain’t it cute?  Did you make it?” asked Bud, surveying the rudely carved exterior with delight, and her uncle, laughing, put on his glasses to look at it himself. “No,” said he, “though I’ve made a few of them in my time.  All that’s needed is a knife or a mussel-shell, and a dose of Gregory’s Mixture in the morning.” “What’s the Gregory’s Mixture for?” “In making a turnip lantern you eat the whole inside of it,” said Mr Dyce.  “Perhaps I might have made this one myself if it wasn’t that I know I would hate to see the inside wasted, and still I have mind of the Gregory.  I bought the lantern from a boy at the head of the street who was looking very gash and ill, and seemed suspiciously glad to get quit of it.  I’m thinking that his Gregory’s nearly due.” Bud hardly listened—she was so taken up with her gift.  She pounced at the handle of the kitchen door and found it snibbed within.  “Kate! Kate!” she cried, “let me in to light my lantern.” Kate was to be heard moving within, and there was a curious sound of giggling, but no answer. “Open the door, quick, quick!” cried Bud again; and this time Auntie Bell, inside, said, “Yes, open, Kate, I think we’re ready.” The door of the kitchen opened, and before the eyes of the child was a spectacle the more amazing and delightful since all day they had taken pains to keep the preparations secret.  A dozen children, who had been smuggled in by the back-door in the close, were seated round a tub of water with floating apples, and they were waiting her presence to begin their fun. Oh, how happy was that hour!  But not just then came the thrill of which I’m thinking.  It was not the laughter and the ducking in the tub, the discoveries of rings and buttons, thimbles, and scuddy little dolls and silver pieces hidden in the mound of champed potatoes Kate had cooked; nor the supper that followed, nor the mating of nuts on the fire-ribs that gave the eerie flavour of old time and the book of ballads.  She liked them all; her transport surely was completed when the guizards entered black-faced, garmented as for a masque, each thumping a sheepskin stretched on a barrel-hoop—the thing we call a dallan.  She had never discovered before what a soul of gaiety was in Auntie Bell, demure so generally, practising sobriety, it might seem, as if she realised her daffing days were over and it was time for her to remember all her years.  To-night Miss Bell outdid even Ailie in her merriment, led the games in the spacious kitchen, and said such droll things, and kept the company in such a breeze that Ailie cried at last, “I think, Bell, that you’re fey!” “Indeed, and I daresay you’re right,” admitted Bell, sinking in a chair exhausted.  “At my time of life it’s daft; I have not laughed so much since I was at Barbara Mushet’s seminary.” Not these things, but the half-hour after, was what made the evening memorable for the child.  Nothing would satisfy her but that she should light her lantern and convoy the other children home, so Kate went with her, and the happy band went through the street, each dropping off at her own house front till the last was gone, and then Bud and the maid turned back. But Kate had a project in her mind that had been there all night since she had burned two nuts for herself and Charles in the kitchen fire, and found them willing to flame quite snug together.  That so far, was satisfactory, but she wanted more assurance of the final triumph of her love.  There was, it seemed, a skilful woman up the lane who knew spells and magic, read tea-cups and the cards, and could unravel dreams.  Notably was she good at Hallowe’en devices, and Bud must come and see her, for it would not take a minute. They found their way by the light of the lantern to the spaewife’s door, and to a poor confidant of fate and fortune surely, since she had not found them kinder to herself, for she dwelt in a hovel where foolish servant-girls came at night with laughter and fears to discover what the future held for them.  Bud, standing on the floor in the circle of light from her own lantern, watched the woman drop the white of an egg in a glass of water.  In the clot of the albumen, which formed some wavering vague figures, she peered and found, she said, the masts of ships and a crowded harbour, and that meant a sailor husband. “Was I not sure of it!” cried Kate, triumphant; but that was not the end of the ceremony, for she was bidden to sip a little from the glass, without swallowing, and go dumb into the night till she heard the Christian name of a man, and that was the name of the sailor husband.  Kate sipped from the glass of destiny, and passed with Bud into the darkness of the lane.  It was then there came to the child the delicious wild eerieness that she was beginning now to coax to her spirit whenever she could, and feed her fancies on.  The light of the lantern only wanly illumined the lane they hurried through; so plain and grey and ancient and dead looked the houses pressing on either hand with windows shuttered, that it seemed to Bud she had come by magic on a shell as empty of life as the armour in the castle hall.  By-and-by the servant, speechless, stopped at a corner listening.  No sound of human life for a moment, but then a murmur of voices up the town, to which on an impulse she started running with Lennox at her heels, less quickly since the light of her lantern must be nursed from the wind.  Bud fell behind in the race for the voice of fate; the sound of the footsteps before her died away in the distance, and her light went out, and there she stood alone for the first time in the dark of Scotland—Scotland where witches still wrought spells!  A terror that was sweet to think of in the morning, whose memory she cherished all her days, seized on her, and she knew that all the ballad book was true!  One cry she gave, that sounded shrilly up the street—it was the name of Charles, and Kate, hearing it, gulped and came back.

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