Neil Munro

“ I came home from school with 'quaint' myself; it not only seemed to save a lot of trouble by being a word which could be applied to anything not otherwise describable, but I cherished it because its use conferred on me a kind of inward glow of satisfaction like—like—like Aunt Bell's homemade ginger cordial. 'Quaint,' Bud, is the shibboleth of boarding-school culture; when you can use the word in the proper place, with a sense of superiority to the thing so designated, you are practically a young lady and the polish is taking on. ”

“ I hope that no matter how often or how early we rap at the brass knocker, or how timidly, Kate will come, and in one breath say, “What is't? Come in!” We may hear, when we're in, people passing in the street, and the wild geese call—wild geese, wild geese! this time I will not follow where you tempt to where are only silence and dream—the autumn and the summer days may cry us out to garden and wood, but if I can manage it I will lock the door on the inside, and shut us snugly in with Daniel Dyce and his household, and it will be well with us then. ”

“ 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! ”

“ With a chuckle of horse's hoofs on shining streets, Dan Dyce, with Bell and Ailie, drove from Molyneux's fine new home to the temple of his former dreams—the proud Imperial. They sat in silence in the darkness of the cab, and in silence drifted into the entrance hall of the theatre to mingle with the pompous world incongruously—with loud, vainglorious men, who bore to the eye of Bell some spirit of abandonment and mockery, with women lovely by the gift of God, or with dead-white faces, wax-red lips, and stealthy, sidelong eyes. ”

“ Bell and Ailie and their brother sat in the parlor, silent, playing cards with a dummy hand, and Bud, with Footles in her lap, behind the winter dikes on which clothes dried before the kitchen fire, crouched on the fender with a Shakespeare, where almost breathlessly she read the great, the glorious Macbeth.
“My stars, what a night!” said Kate. “The way them slates and chimney-cans are flying! It must be the antinuptial gales. I thought every minute would by my next. Oh, towns! towns! Stop you till I get back to Colonsay, and I'll not leave it in a hurry, I'll assure you.” ”

“ If Dickens could have known the curious sentiments his wandering hero roused in this Highland servant mind he would have greatly wondered.
While Bud was tutoring Kate that spring, Miss Bell was thinking to take up the training of Bud herself in wiselike housekeeping. The child grew as fast in her mind as in her body; each day she seemed to drift farther away from the hearth and into the world from which her auntie would preserve her—into the world whose doors books widely opened, Auntie Ailie's magic key of sympathy, and the genius of herself. ”

“ Look at Captain Consequence, never the same since he was abroad—mulligatawny even-on in India; a score of servant-men, and never a hand's turn for himself—all the blossom from that kind of Indian cress is on his nose.”
“Land's sake! I am glad I'm not dead,” said Bud, with all her body tingling as she heard the bees buzz in the nasturtium bells and watched the droll dog Footles snap at the butterflies.
“It's not a bad world, one way and the other,” said Miss Bell, knitting at her side; “it would have been a hantle worse if we had the making o't. ”

“ She heard from every quarter—from lanes, closes, tavern-rooms, high attics, and back yards—fifes playing; it was as if she leaned over a magic grove of great big birds, each singing its own song—“Come to the Bower,” or “Moneymusk,” or “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” noble airs wherein the captain of the band looked for a certain perfection from his musicians before they marched out again at mid-day. “For,” said he often in rehearsals, “anything will do in the way of a tune in the dark, my sunny boys, but it must be the tiptop of skill, and no discordancy, when the eyes of the world are on us. ”

“ CHAPTER I THE town's bell rang through the dark of the winter morning with queer little jolts and pauses, as if Wanton Wully Oliver, the ringer, had been jovial the night before. A blithe New-Year's-time bell; a droll, daft, scatter-brained bell; it gave no horrid alarms, no solemn reminders that commonly toll from steeples and make good-fellows melancholy to think upon things undone, the brevity of days and years, the parting of good company, but a cheery ditty—“boom, boom, ding-a-dong boom, boom ding, hie, ding-dong,” infecting whoever heard it with a kind of foolish gayety. ”

“ The world is coming for Lennox Dyce, the greedy, greedy world, youth's first and worst beguiler, that promises so much, but at the best has only bubbles to give, which borrow for a moment the splendor of the sin, then burst in the hands that grasp them—the world that will have only our bravest and most clever bairns, and takes them all from us one by one. ”

“ Oh, love's a wonderful thing, Charles; it's the Great Thing; but sometimes I say, 'Give me Uncle Dan!' Promise you'll not go marrying Kate right off.”
The sailor roared with laughter. “Lord!” said he, “if I wait too long I'll be wanting to marry yourself, for you're a dangerous gyurl.”
“But I'm never going to marry,” said Bud. “I want to go right on loving everybody, and don't yearn for any particular man tagging on to me.”
“I never heard so much about love in English all my life,” said Charles, “though it's common enough, and quite respectable in Gaelic. Do you—do you love myself?” ”

“ I will never rest, but go on, and on, and on; and everywhere everybody will know about me—even in the tiny minstrel towns where they have no or'nary luck but just coon shows, for it's in these places croodles must be most catching. I'll go there and play for nothing, just to show them what a dear soul Rosalind was. I want to grow fast, fast! I want to be tall like my auntie Ailie, and lovely like my dear auntie Ailie, and clever like my sweet, sweet aunt Ailie. ”

“ To glorify's to wonder and adore, and who keeps the wondering, humble heart, the adoring eye, is to God pleasing exceedingly. Sing, lassie, sing, sing, sing, inside ye, even if ye are as timmer as a cask. God knows I have not much of a voice myself, but I'm full of nobler airs than ever crossed my rusty thrapple. To be grateful always, and glad things are no worse, is a good song to start the morning.”
“Ah, but sin, Dan, sin!” said Bell, sighing, for she always feared her own light-heartedness. ”

“ Brash, what about my future?”
He glanced up a moment and saw her aunt and uncle listening in amusement, unaware as yet that he knew the secret, then scanned her palm again.
“The future—h'm! let me see. A long line of life; heart line healthy—h'm—the best of your life's before you, though I cannot say it may be the happiest part of it. Perhaps my—h'm—my skill a little fails here. You have a strong will, Miss—Miss Macintosh, and I doubt in this world you'll aye have your own way. ”

“ Molyneux, understanding her scruples. Bud's face mutely pleaded.
Yes, “just this once!”—it was all very well, but Ailie knew the dangers of beginnings. It would not even be, in this case, a beginning; the beginning was years ago—before the mimicry on the first New Year's morning, before the night of the dozen candles or the creation of The Macintosh: the child had been carried onward like a feather in a stream.
“I really don't mind much myself,” said Ailie at last, “but I fancy her aunt Bell would scarcely like it.” ”

“ But Kate, too, had her dreams—of some misty lad of the mind, with short, curled hair, clothes brass-buttoned, and a delicious smell of tar—something or other on a yacht. The name she had endowed him with was Charles. She made him up from passing visions of seamen on the quays, and of notions gleaned from her reading of penny novelettes.
One week-night Bud came on her in the kitchen dressed in her Sunday clothes and struggling with a spluttering pen.
“Are you at your lessons, too?” said the child. “You naughty Kate! there's a horrid blot. No lady makes blots.” ”

“ And Wanton Wully, when he was not bell-ringing, or cleaning the streets, or lounging on the quay to keep tally of ships that never came, being at ports more propinque to the highways of the world, where folks are making fortunes and losing much innocent diversion, wrought—as he would call it—in the Dyce's garden. Not a great gardener, admittedly, for to be great in versatility is of necessity to miss perfection in anything, so that the lowest wages in the markets of the world are for the handy man. ”

“ Even herself, who had been at the making of most of them the day before, and had, by God's grace, still much of a child's appetite, could not but sniff with a childish satisfaction at this air of a celestial grocery—of plum-puddings and currant-buns, apples and oranges, cordials and spices, toffee and the angelic treacly sweet we call Black Man—her face lit rosily by the candle low, a woman small and soft and sappy, with the most wanton reddish hair, and a briskness of body that showed no sign as yet of her accomplished years. ”