“You have come to a hospitable town, Bud,” said Ailie. “There are convivial old gentlemen on the other side of the street who have got up a petition to the magistrates to shut up the inn and the public-house in the afternoon. They say it is in the interests of temperance, but it's really to compel their convivial friends to visit themselves.”
“I signed it myself,” confessed Mr. Dyce, “and I'm only half convivial. I'm not bragging; I might have been more convivial if it didn't so easily give me an aching head. What's more cheerful than a crowd in the house and the clash going? A fine fire, a good light, and turn about at a story! The happiest time I ever had in my life was when I broke my leg; so many folk called, it was like a month of New Year's Days. I was born with a craving for company. Mother used to have a superstition that if a knife or spoon dropped on the floor from the table it betokened a visitor, and I used to drop them by the dozen. But, dear me! here's a wean with a doll, and where in the world did she get it?”
Bud, with the doll under one arm and the dog tucked under the other, laughed up in his face with shy perception.
“Oh, you funny man!” she exclaimed. “I guess you know all right who put Alibel on my pillow. Why! I could have told you were a doll man: I noticed you turning over the pennies in your pants' pocket, same as poppa used when he saw any nice clean little girl like me, and he was the dolliest man in all Chicago. Why, there was treasury days when he just rained dolls.”
“That was William, sure enough,” said Mr. Dyce. “There's no need for showing us your strawberry mark. It was certainly William. If it had only been dolls!”
“Her name's Alibel, for her two aunties,” said the child.
“Tuts!” said Mr. Dyce. “If I had thought you meant to honor them that way I would have made her twins. But you see I did not know; it was a delicate transaction as it was. I could not tell very well whether a doll or a—a—or a fountain-pen would be the most appropriate present for a ten-year-old niece from Chicago, and I risked the doll. I hope it fits.”
“Like a halo! It's just sweet!” said the ecstatic maiden, and rescued one of its limbs from the gorge of Footles.
It got about the town that to Dyces' house had come a wonderful American child who talked language like a minister: the news was partly the news of the mail-driver and Wully Oliver, but mostly the news of Kate, who, from the moment Lennox had been taken from her presence and put to bed, had dwelt upon the window-sashes, letting no one pass that side of the street without her confidence.
“You never heard the like! No' the size of a shilling worth of ha'pennies, and she came all the way by her lee-lone in the coach from Chickagoo—that's in America. There's to be throng times in this house now, I'm tellin' you, with brother William's wean.”