“It did me a lot of good, yon dancing,” said Kate. “Did you put yon words about Macbeth sleep no more together yourself?”
“Yes,” said Bud, and then repented. “No,” she added, hurriedly, “that's a fib; please, God, give me a true tongue. It was made by Shakespeare—dear old Will!”
“I'm sure I never heard of the man in all my life before; but he must have been a bad one.”
“Why, Kate, you are as fresh as the mountain breeze,” said Bud. “He was Great! He was born at Stratford-on-Avon, a poor boy, and went to London and held horses outside the theatre door, and then wrote plays so grand that only the best can act them. He was—he was not for an age, but all the time.”
She had borrowed the lesson as well as the manner of Auntie Ailie, who smiled in the dark of the pantry at this glib rendering of herself.
“Oh, I should love to play Rosalind,” continued the child. “I should love to play everything. When I am big, and really Winifred Wallace, I will go all over the world and put away people's croodles same as I did yours, Kate, and they will love me; and I will make them feel real good, and sometimes cry—for that is beautiful, too. I will never rest, but go on, and on, and on; and everywhere everybody will know about me—even in the tiny minstrel towns where they have no or'nary luck but just coon shows, for it's in these places croodles must be most catching. I'll go there and play for nothing, just to show them what a dear soul Rosalind was. I want to grow fast, fast! I want to be tall like my auntie Ailie, and lovely like my dear auntie Ailie, and clever like my sweet, sweet aunt Ailie.”
“She's big enough and bonny enough, and clever enough in some things,” said the maid; “but can she sew like her sister?—tell me that!”
“Sew!” exclaimed the child, with a frown. “I hate sewing. I guess Auntie Ailie's like me, and feels sick when she starts a hem and sees how long it is, and all to be gone over with small stitches.”
“Indeed, indeed I do,” whispered Ailie in the pantry, and she was trembling. She told me later how she felt—of her conviction then that for her the years of opportunity were gone, the golden years that had slipped past in the little burgh town without a chance for her to grasp their offerings. She told me of her resolution there and then that this child, at least, should have its freedom to expand.
Bud crept to the end of the crescent of her footlights and blew out the candles slowly one by one. The last she left a-light a little longer, and, crouched upon the floor, she gazed with large, dreaming eyes into its flame as if she read there.