Miss Almeana Whittaker, the while, was placidly untying her nightcap. (Nightcaps were still useful to Miss Almeana.) She was not in the least suspicious that her heathen niece, as she chose to call her, was awake at this early hour. She often told her brother that children kicked against going to bed at night, and might just as well kick about getting up in the morning. To Chee, she would say, “Go to bed so’s to get up.”
“Chee! Chee!” came from the stairway.
“Yes, Aunt, I’m awake.”
“What’s struck her to wake this early?” she asked, but that was the last she thought of it.
CHAPTER III.
OH, the excitement of the days that followed that memorable concert! The pleasure, to Chee, of a secret all her own! The attempts and failures to make music! She was not even familiar with the beginnings of melody; if she had heard of a scale, she did not known its meaning. So, for awhile, she tried with her little, trembling fingers, to draw tones from the old, loosened strings.
After repeated trials and no music, she grew discouraged; even her untrained ear found something very, very wrong. “It’s the fiddle,” she concluded, “it’s too old. It won’t work. If I only had a new one now, brandy-new from the store, I know I could do it. I hear lots of songs in my head, but I can’t hear them in the fiddle.” However, the idea that the violin was too old was soon corrected.
One Sunday morning Chee sat in church, thinking there must be baby birds just outside a window near. The songs the old birds were singing made her think so. It had been a bright day, but for a moment the sky was clouded.
“What a terrible big bird Culloo[1] must be to hide the whole sun! There, he’s gone now. I do hope he will stay away.” Chee shuddered a little. Aunt Mean frowned at her from the end of the pew. She could not understand her niece’s fanciful, almost superstitious ideas. It was not strange that so sensitive a nature as Chee’s, of which the fantastic beliefs of her mother’s race were a prominent part, could have little in common with the blunt, doctrinal mind of Aunt Mean.
All the little sounds of the outdoor world had each a separate individuality for Chee. The tall, stiff poplars in the churchyard, mingling their metallic rustle with the dainty murmur of the willows, caused Aunt Mean to think, “I guess it’s going to blow up a storm, the trees air a-rattling.”