“Your uncle is always a little daft, my dear,” she said.
“I would rather be daft than dismal,” he retorted, cleaning his glasses.
“It’s a singular thing that the clocks in our lobby and parlour always stop on the New Year’s day, Lennox.”
“Bud; please, say Bud,” pleaded the little one. “Nobody ever calls me Lennox ’cept when I’m doing something wrong and almost going to get a whipping.”
“Very well, Bud, then. This clock gets something wrong with it every New Year’s day, for your uncle, that man there, wants the folk who call never to know the time so that they’ll bide the longer.”
“Tuts!” said Uncle Dan, who had thought this was his own particular recipe for joviality, and that they had never discovered it.
“You have come to a hospitable town, Bud,” said Ailie. “There are convivial old gentlemen on the other side of the street who have got up a petition to the magistrates to shut up the inn and the public-house in the afternoon. They say it is in the interests of temperance, but it’s really to compel their convivial friends to visit themselves.”
“I signed it myself,” confessed Mr Dyce, “and I’m only half convivial. I’m not bragging; I might have been more convivial if it didn’t so easily give me a sore head. What’s more cheerful than a crowd in the house and the clash going? A fine fire, a good light, and turn about at a story! The happiest time I ever had in my life was when I broke my leg; so many folk called, it was like a month of New Year’s days. I was born with a craving for company. Mother used to have a superstition that if a knife or spoon dropped on the floor from the table it betokened a visitor, and I used to drop them by the dozen. But, dear me! here’s a wean with a doll, and where in the world did she get it?”
Bud, with the doll under one arm and the dog tucked under the other, laughed up in his face with shy perception.
“Oh, you funny man!” she exclaimed. “I guess you know all right who put Alibel on my pillow. Why! I could have told you were a doll man: I noticed you turning over the pennies in your pants’ pocket, same as poppa used when he saw any nice clean little girl like me, and he was the dolliest man in all Chicago. Why, there was treasury days when he just rained dolls.”