“’Tis stay-in-the-hoose weather,” the old Scotch woman declared. “Roughs and toughs, like this Sammy Pinkney boy, can roll in the snow like porpoises in the sea; but little girls would much better stay indoor and dance ‘Katie Beardie.’”
“Oh, Mrs. Mac!” cried Dot, “what is ‘dancing Katie Beardie’?”
So the housekeeper stopped long enough in her oversight of Linda, the Finnish girl, to repeat the old rhyme one hears to this day amid the clatter of little clogs upon the pavements of Edinburgh.
“‘Katie Beardie had a grice,
It could skate upon the ice;
Wasna that a dainty grice?
Dance, Katie Beardie!
Katie Beardie had a hen,
Cackled but and cackled ben;
Wasna that a dainty hen?
Dance, Katie Beardie!’
“and you little ones have been ‘cackling but and cackling ben’ ever since breakfast time. Do, children, go upstairs, like good bairns, and stay awhile.”
Tess and Dot understood a good deal of Mrs. MacCall’s Scotch, for they heard it daily. But now she had to explain that a “grice” was a pig and that “but” and “ben” meant in and out. But even Sammy knew how to “count out” in Scotch, for they had long since learned Mrs. MacCall’s doggerel for games.
Now they played hide and seek, using one of the counting-out rhymes the housekeeper had taught them:
Eenerty, feenerty, fickerty, faig,
Ell, dell, domen, aig.
Irky, birky, story, rock,
Ann, tan, touzelt Jock.
And then Sammy disappeared! It was Dot’s turn to be “it,” and she counted one hundred five times by the method approved, saying very rapidly: “Ten, ten, double-ten, forty-five and fifteen!” Then she began to hunt.
She found Tess in the wardrobe in the hall which led to the other ell of the big house. But Sammy! Why, it was just as though he had flown right out of existence!