said Bud, burying her head in his mane.
“Good Lord! did you make that yourself, or just keep mind of it?” asked the astounded Kate.
“I made it just right here,” said Bud coolly. “Didn’t you know I could make poetry? Why, you poor perishing soul, I’m just a regular wee—wee whitterick at poetry! It goes sloshing round in my head, and it’s simply pie for me to make it. Here’s another—
‘Lives of great men oft remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.’
I just dash them off. I guess I’ll have to get up bright and early to-morrow and touch that one up some. Mostly you can’t make them good the first try, and then you’re bound to go all over them from the beginning and put the good in here and there. That’s art, Jim says. He knew an artist who’d finish a picture with everything quite plain about it, and then say, ‘Now for the Art!’ and fuzz it all with a hard brush.”
“My stars! what things you know!” exclaimed the maid. “You’re clever—tremendous clever! What’s your age?”
“I was born mighty well near ten years ago,” said Bud, as if she were a centenarian.
Now it is not wise to tell a child like Lennox Dyce that she is clever, though a maid from Colonsay could scarcely be expected to know that. Till Bud had landed on the British shore she had no reason to think herself anything out of the ordinary. Jim Molyneux and his wife, with no children of their own, and no knowledge of children except the elderly kind that play in theatres, had treated her like a person little younger than themselves, and saw no marvel in her quickness, that is common enough with Young America. But Bud, from Maryfield to her uncle’s door, had been a “caution” to the plainly admiring mail-driver; a kind of fairy princess to Wanton Wully Oliver and his wife; the surprise of her aunts had been only half concealed, and here was the maid in an undisguised enchantment! The vanity of ten-year-old was stimulated; for the first time in her life she felt decidedly superior.
“It was very brave of me to come all this way in a ship at ten years old,” she proceeded.
“I once came to Oban along with a steamer myself,” said Kate, “but och, that’s nothing, for I knew a lot of the drovers. Just fancy you coming from America! Were you not lonely?”