Supplied with this fluid, which having been made too thick required a good deal of water to thin it, Tottie again squared her elbows on the table; the parents sat down, and the Bu’ster re-mounted guard with the blotting-paper, this time carefully out of earshot.
“Now, then, ‘dear sir,’” said Tottie, once more dipping her pen.
“No, no; didn’t I say, plain ‘Sir,’” remonstrated her father.
“Oh, I forgot, well—there—it—is—now, ‘Plane sur,’ but I’ve not been taught that way at school yet.”
“Never mind what you’ve bin taught at school,” said Mrs Gaff somewhat sharply, for her patience was gradually oozing out, “do you what you’re bid.”
“Why, it looks uncommon like two words, Tottie,” observed her father, eyeing the letters narrowly. “I would ha’ thought, now, that three letters or four at most would have done it, an’ some to spare.”
“Three letters, daddie!” exclaimed the scribe with a laugh, “there’s eight of ’em no less.”
“Eight!” exclaimed Gaff in amazement. “Let’s hear ’em, dear.”
Tottie spelled them off quite glibly. “P-l-a-n-e, that’s plane; s-u-r, that’s sur.”
“Oh, Tot,” said Gaff with a mingled expression of annoyance and amusement, “I didn’t want ye to write the word ‘plain.’ Well, well,” he added, patting the child on the head, while she blushed up to the roots of her hair and all down her neck and shoulders, “it’s not much matter, just you score it out; there, go over it again, once or twice, an’ scribble through it,—that’s your sort. Now, can ye read what it was?”