CHAPTER XIV
FOLLOWING on stormy weeks had come an Indian summer, when the world was blessed with Ailie's idea of Arden weather, that keeps one wood forever green and glad with company, knows only the rumor of distant ice and rain, and makes men, reading thereof by winter fires, smell fir and feel the breeze on their naked necks and hunger for the old, abandoned bed among the brackens. “It is better to hear the lark sing than the mouse squeak,” was the motto of Daniel Dyce, and though the larks were absent, he would have the little one' in the garden long hours of the day. She basked there like a kitten in the sunlight till her wan cheek bloomed. The robin sang among the apples—pensive a bit for the ear of age that knows the difference between the voice of spring and autumn—sweet enough for youth that happily does not have an ear for its gallant melancholy; the starlings blew like a dust about the sky; over the garden wall—the only one in the town that wanted broken bottles—far-off hills raised up their heads to keek at the little lassie, who saw from this that the world was big and glorious as ever.
“My! ain't this fine and clean?” said Bud. “Feels as if Aunt Bell had been up this morning bright and early with a duster.” She was enraptured with the blaze of the nasturtiums, that Bell would aye declare should be the flower of Scotland, for “Indian cress here, or Indian cress there,” as she would say “they're more like Scots than any flower I ken. The poorer the soil the better they thrive, and they come to gold where all your fancy flowers would rot for the want of nutriment. Nutriment! Give them that in plenty and you'll see a bonny display of green and no' much blossom. The thing's a parable—the worst you can do with a Scotsman, if you want the best from him, 's to feed him ower rich. Look at Captain Consequence, never the same since he was abroad—mulligatawny even-on in India; a score of servant-men, and never a hand's turn for himself—all the blossom from that kind of Indian cress is on his nose.”
“Land's sake! I am glad I'm not dead,” said Bud, with all her body tingling as she heard the bees buzz in the nasturtium bells and watched the droll dog Footles snap at the butterflies.
“It's not a bad world, one way and the other,” said Miss Bell, knitting at her side; “it would have been a hantle worse if we had the making o't. But here we have no continuing city, and yonder—if the Lord had willed—you would have gone sweeping through the gates of the new Jerusalem.”
“Sweeping!” said the child. “I can't sweep for keeps; Kate won't give me a chance to learn. But, anyhow, I guess this is a good enough world for a miserable sinner like me.”
Mr. Dyce, who had carried her, chair and all, into the garden, though she could have walked there, chuckled at this confession.
“Dan,” said Bell, “think shame of yourself! you make the child light-minded.”
“The last thing I would look for in women is consistency,” said he, “and I dare say that's the way I like them. What is it Ailie quotes from Emerson?
'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,'