“No,” said Bud sorrowfully. “You have no idea what a poor mean place Chicago is—not a thing but common electric light!” and Miss Ailie smiled gleefully to herself again like one possessed of a lovely secret. “I wish that brother of mine would come quickly,” she said, and at the moment he came out of the darkness to them with a comical look of embarrassment in his face and in his hand an unlighted turnip lantern!
“Here, Bud,” said he, “take this, quickly, before some silly body sees me with it and thinks it’s for myself. I have the name, I know, of being daft enough already, and if it gets about the country that Daniel Dyce was going round at Hallowe’en with a turnip lantern, they would think he had lost his head in a double sense and it would be very bad for business.”
“Uncle!” cried the child in ecstasy, “you’re the loveliest, sweetest man in the whole wide world.”
“I daresay,” said he. “I have been much admired when I was younger. But in this case don’t blame me. I wash my hands of the responsibility. I got my orders for that thing from your Auntie Bell.”
“My! ain’t it cute? Did you make it?” asked Bud, surveying the rudely carved exterior with delight, and her uncle, laughing, put on his glasses to look at it himself.
“No,” said he, “though I’ve made a few of them in my time. All that’s needed is a knife or a mussel-shell, and a dose of Gregory’s Mixture in the morning.”
“What’s the Gregory’s Mixture for?”
“In making a turnip lantern you eat the whole inside of it,” said Mr Dyce. “Perhaps I might have made this one myself if it wasn’t that I know I would hate to see the inside wasted, and still I have mind of the Gregory. I bought the lantern from a boy at the head of the street who was looking very gash and ill, and seemed suspiciously glad to get quit of it. I’m thinking that his Gregory’s nearly due.”
Bud hardly listened—she was so taken up with her gift. She pounced at the handle of the kitchen door and found it snibbed within. “Kate! Kate!” she cried, “let me in to light my lantern.”
Kate was to be heard moving within, and there was a curious sound of giggling, but no answer.