“What are you bumming away at up there the pair of you?” Bell would cry, coming to the stair-foot. “If you sing before breakfast, you'll greet before night!”
“Don't she like singing in the morning?” Bud asked, nestling beside him, and he laughed.
“It's an old freit—an old superstition,” said he, “that it's unlucky to begin the day too blithely. It must have been a doctor that started it, but you would wonder at the number of good and douce Scots folk, plain bodies like ourselves, that have the notion in their mind from infancy, and never venture a cheep or chirrup before the day's well aired.”
“My stars, ain't she Scotch, Auntie Bell!” said Bud. “So was father. He would sing any time; he would sing if it broke a tooth; but he was pretty Scotch other ways. Once he wore a pair of kilts to a Cale—to a Caledonian club.”
“I don't keep a kilt myself,” said her uncle. “The thing's not strictly necessary unless you're English and have a Hielan' shooting.”
“Auntie Bell is the genuine Scotch stuff, I guess!”
“There's no concealing the fact that she is,” her uncle admitted. “She's so Scotch that I am afraid she's apt to think of God as a countryman of her own.” And there were the hours that Ailie gave with delight to Bud's more orthodox tuition. The back room that was called Dan's study, because he sometimes took a nap there after dinner, became a schoolroom. There was a Mercator's map of the world on the wall, and another of Europe, that of themselves gave the place the right academy aspect. With imagination, a map, and The Golden Treasury you might have as good as a college education, according to Ailie. They went long voyages together on Mercator; saw marvellous places; shivered at the poles or languished 4 in torrid plains, sometimes before Kate could ring the bell for breakfast. There seemed no spot in the world that this clever auntie had not some knowledge of. How eagerly they crossed continents, how ingeniously they planned routes! For the lengths of rivers, the heights of mountains, the values of exports, and all the trivial passing facts that mar the great game of geography for many childish minds, they had small consideration; what they gathered in their travels were sounds, colors, scenes, weather, and the look of races. What adventures they had! as when, pursued by elephants and tigers, they sped in a flash from Bengal to the Isle of Venice, and saw the green slime of the sea on her steeping palaces. Yes, the world is all for the folk of imagination. 'Love maps and you will never be too old or too poor to travel,' was Ailie's motto. She found a hero or a heroine for every spot upon Mercator, and nourished so the child in noble admirations.
You might think it would always be the same pupil and the same teacher, but no, they sometimes changed places. If Ailie taught Bud her own love for the lyrics that are the best work of men in their hours of exaltation, Bud sent Ailie back to her Shakespeare, and sweet were the days they spent in Arden or Prospero's Isle.
It was well with them then; it was well with the woman and the child, and they were happy.