"Och! laughin' roses are my lips,
Forget-me-nots my ee,
It's many a lad they're drivin' mad;
Shall they not so wi' ye?
Heigho! the morning dew!
Heigho! the rose and rue!
Follow me, my bonny lad,
For I'll not follow you.
"Wi' heart in mout', in hope and doubt,
My lovers come and go:
My smiles receive, my smiles deceive;
Shall they not serve you so?
Heigho! the morning dew!
Heigho! the rose and rue!
Follow me, my bonny lad,
For I'll not follow you."
It was a delight to hear her.
"There now, I'll give yer my token. Hold out yer hands!"
Champney, hugging his banjo under one arm, made a cup of his hands. Carefully measuring the distance, she dropped one rosebud into them.
"Put it on yer heart now," was the next command from above. He obeyed with exaggerated gesture, to the great delight of the serenadee. "And yer goin' to keep it?"
"Forever and a day." Champney made this assertion with a hyper-sentimental inflection of voice, and, lifting the flower to his nose, drew in his breath—
"Confound you, you little fiend—" he sneezed rather than spoke.
The sneeze was answered by a peal of laughter from above and a fifteen-year-old's cracked "Haw-haw-haw" from the region of the Norway spruces. Every succeeding sneeze met with a like response—roars of laughter on the one hand and peal upon peal on the other. Even the kitchen door began to give signs of life, for Hannah and Ann made their appearance.
The strong white pepper, which Romanzo managed to procure from Hannah, had been cunningly secreted by Aileen between the imbricate petals, and then tied, in a manner invisible at night, with a fine thread of pink silk begged from Ann. It was now acting and re-acting on the lining of the serenader's olfactory organ in a manner to threaten final decapitation. Champney was still young enough to resent being made a subject of such practical joking by a little girl; but he was also sufficiently wise to acknowledge to himself that he had been worsted and, in the end, to put a good face on it. It is true he would have preferred that Romanzo Caukins had not been witness to his defeat.