The Daft Days. Munro Neil

feels she can’t put up with us any longer, she hurls herself on the morning newspaper to look at the advertisements for ladies’ maids and housekeepers with £50 a-year, and makes up her mind to apply at once, but can never find a pen that suits her before we make her laugh. The servant in the house of Dyce who laughs is lost. You’ll like Kate, Bud. We like her; and I notice that if you like anybody they generally like you back.”

      “I’m so glad,” said Bud with enthusiasm. “If there’s one thing under the canopy I am, I’m a liker.”

      They had reached the door of the house without seeing the slightest sign that the burgh was interested in them, but they were no sooner in than a hundred tongues were discussing the appearance of the little American. Ailie took off Bud’s cloak and hood, and pushed her into the kitchen, with a whisper to her that she was to make Kate’s acquaintance, and be sure and praise her scones, then left her and flew upstairs, with a pleasant sense of personal good-luck. It was so sweet to know that brother William’s child was anything but a diffy.

      Bud stood for a moment in the kitchen, bashful, for it must not be supposed she lacked a childish shyness. Kate, toasting bread at the fire, turned round and felt a little blate herself, but smiled at her, such a fine expansive smile, it was bound to put the child at ease. “Come away in, my dear, and take a bite,” said the maid. It is so they greet you – simple folk! – in the isle of Colonsay.

      The night was coming on, once more with snowy feathers. Wanton Wully lit the town. He went from lamp to lamp with a ladder, children in his train chanting and he expostulating with “I know you fine, the whole of you; at least I know the boys. Stop you till I see your mothers!” Miss Minto’s shop was open, and shamefaced lads went dubiously in to buy ladies’ white gloves, for with gloves they tryst their partners here at New Year balls, and to-night was Samson’s fiddle giggling at the inn. The long tenement lands, as flat and high as cliffs, and built for all eternity, at first dark grey in the dusk, began to glow in every window, and down the stairs and from the closes flowed exceeding cheerful sounds. Green fires of wood and coal sent up a cloud above these dwellings, tea-kettles jigged, and sang. A thousand things were happening in the street, but for once the maid of Colonsay restrained her interest in the window. “Tell me this, what did you say your name was?” she asked.

      “Leerie, leerie, light the lamps,

      Long legs and crooked shanks!” —

      “I’m Miss Lennox Brenton Dyce,” said Bud primly, “but the Miss don’t amount to much till I’m old enough to get my hair up.”

      “You must be tired coming so far. All the way from that Chickagoo!”

      “Chicago,” suggested Bud politely.

      “Just that! Chickagoo or Chicago, it depends on the way you spell it,” said Kate readily. “I was brought up to call it Chickagoo. What a length to come on New Year’s day! Were you not frightened? Try one of them brown biscuits. And how are they all keeping in America?”

      She asked the question with such tender solicitude that Bud saw no humour in it, and answered gravely —

      “Pretty spry, thank you. Have you been there?”

      “Me!” cried Kate, with her bosom heaving at the very thought. Then her Highland vanity came to her rescue. “No,” she said, “I have not been exactly what you might call altogether there, but I had a cousin that started for Australia, and got the length of Paisley. It’ll be a big place America? Put butter on it.”

      “The United States of America are bounded on the east by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by the Pacific, on the south by Mexico and the Gulf, and on the north by an imaginary line called Canada. The State of New York alone is as large as England,” said Bud glibly, repeating a familiar lesson.

      “What a size!” cried Kate. “Take another of them brown biscuits. Scotland’s not slack neither for size; there’s Glasgow and Oban, and Colonsay and Stornoway. There’ll not be hills in America?’

      “There’s no hills, just mountains,” said Bud. “The chief mountain ranges are the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. They’re about the biggest mountains in the world.”

      “Talking about big things, look at the big pennyworth of milk we get here,” said Kate, producing a can: it was almost the last ditch of her national pride.

      The child looked gravely into the can, and then glanced shrewdly at the maid.

      “It isn’t a pennyworth,” said she sharply, “it’s twopence worth.”

      “My stars! how did you know that?” said Kate, much taken aback.

      “’Cause you’re bragging. Think I don’t know when anybody’s bragging?” said Bud. “And when a body brags about a place or anything, they zaggerate, and just about double things.”

      “You’re not canny,” said Kate, thrusting the milk-can back hastily on the kitchen dresser. “Don’t spare the butter on your biscuit. They tell me there’s plenty of money in America. I would not wonder, eh?”

      “Why, everybody’s got money to throw at the birds there,” said Bud, with some of the accent as well as the favourite phrase of Jim Molyneux.

      “They have little to do; forbye, it’s cruelty. Mind you, there’s plenty of money here too; your uncle has a desperate lot of it. He was wanting to go away to America and bring you home whenever he heard – whenever he heard – Will you not try another of them biscuits? It will do you no harm.”

      “I know,” said Bud gravely, – “whenever he heard about my father being dead.”

      “I think we’re sometimes very stupid, us from Colonsay,” said the maid regretfully. “I should have kept my mouth shut about your father. Take two biscuits, my dear; or maybe you would rather have short-cake. Yes, he was for going there and then – even if it cost a pound, I daresay, – but changed his mind when he heard yon man Molyneux was bringing you.”

      Footles, snug in the child’s lap, shared the biscuits and barked for more.

      “I love little Footles,

      His coat is so warm,

      And if I don’t tease him

      He’ll do me no harm,”

      said Bud, burying her head in his mane.

      “Good Lord! did you make that yourself, or just keep mind of it?” asked the astounded Kate.

      “I made it just right here,” said Bud coolly. “Didn’t you know I could make poetry? Why, you poor perishing soul, I’m just a regular wee – wee whitterick at poetry! It goes sloshing round in my head, and it’s simply pie for me to make it. Here’s another —

      ‘Lives of great men oft remind us

      We can make our lives sublime,

      And, departing, leave behind us

      Footprints on the sands of time.’

      I just dash them off. I guess I’ll have to get up bright and early to-morrow and touch that one up some. Mostly you can’t make them good the first try, and then you’re bound to go all over them from the beginning and put the good in here and there. That’s art, Jim says. He knew an artist who’d finish a picture with everything quite plain about it, and then say, ‘Now for the Art!’ and fuzz it all with a hard brush.”

      “My stars! what things you know!” exclaimed the maid. “You’re clever – tremendous clever! What’s your age?”

      “I was born mighty well near ten years ago,” said Bud, as if she were a centenarian.

      Now it is not wise to tell a child like Lennox Dyce that she is clever, though a maid from Colonsay could scarcely be expected to know that. Till Bud had landed on the British shore she had no reason to think herself anything out of the ordinary. Jim Molyneux and his wife, with no children of their own, and no knowledge of children except the elderly kind that play in theatres, had treated her like a person little younger