The night was coming on, once more with snowy feathers. Wanton Wully lit the town. He went from lamp to lamp with a ladder, children in his train chanting:
“'Leerie, leerie, light the lamps.
Long legs and crooked shanks!'”
and he expostulating with: “I know you fine, the whole of you; at least I know the boys. Stop you till I see your mothers!” Miss Minto's shop was open, and shamefaced lads went dubiously in to buy ladies' white gloves, for with gloves they tryst their partners here at New Year balls, and to-night was Samson's fiddle giggling at the inn. The long tenement lands, as flat and high as cliffs, and built for all eternity, at first dark gray in the dusk, began to glow in every window, and down the stairs and from the closes flowed exceeding cheerful sounds. Green fires of wood and coal sent up a cloud above these dwellings, tea-kettles jigged and sang. A thousand things were happening in the street, but for once the maid of Colonsay restrained her interest in the window. “Tell me this, what did you say your name was?” she asked.
“I'm Miss Lennox Brenton Dyce,” said Bud, primly, “but the miss don't amount to much till I'm old enough to get my hair up.”
“You must be tired coming so far. All the way from that Chickagoo!”
“Chicago,” suggested Bud, politely.
“Just that! Chickagoo or Chicago, it depends on the way you spell it,” said Kate, readily. “I was brought up to call it Chickagoo. What a length to come on New Year's Day! Were you not frightened? Try one of them brown biscuits. And how are all the people keeping in America?”
She asked the question with such tender solicitude that Bud saw no humor in it, and answered gravely:
“Pretty spry, thank you. Have you been there?”
“Me!” cried Kate, with her bosom heaving at the very thought. Then her Highland vanity came to her rescue. “No,” she said, “I have not been exactly what you might call altogether there, but I had a cousin that started for Australia and got the length of Paisley. It 'll be a big place, America? Put butter on it.”.