Ben knocked at the door, presented a radiant grin, and invited inspection of his Shanghais. Kate went with him to the cellar. There stood two feathered bipeds on their tip-toes, with their giraffe necks stretched up to my sister's swinging shelf where the cream and butter were kept. It spoke well for the size of their craws certainly, that, during the two minutes Ben was away, they had each devoured a "print" of butter, about half a pound!
"Saw ye ever the like o' thae birds, Miss Kathleen?" began Ben, proudly.
"My butter, my butter!" cried Kate.
Ben ran to the rescue, and having removed everything to the high shelf, he came back, saying,—
"It was na their faut. I tak shame for not minding that they are so gay tall. But did ye ever see the like o' yon rooster?"
Indeed, she never had! The frightful monster, with its bob-tail and boa-constrictor neck! But she said nothing.
Ben named them the Emperor and Empress. They were not to be allowed to walk with common fowls, and he soon had a large, airy house made for them. He watched these creatures with incessant devotion, and one morning he was beside himself with delight, for, by a most hideous roaring on the part of the Emperor, and a vigorous cackling, which Ben, very descriptively, called "scraughing," by the Empress, it was announced that she had laid an egg!
Etiquette required Kate to call and admire this promise of royal offspring, and she was surprised into genuine admiration when she saw the prodigy. Her nose had to lower its scornful turn, her lips to relax their skeptical twist. It was an egg indeed! Ben was nobly justified in his purchase. His step was light that day. Kate heard him singing, over and over again, a verse from an old song which he had brought with him from the land o' cakes:—
"I hae a hen wi' a happity leg,
(Lass, gin ye loe me, tell me noo,)
And ilka day she lays me an egg
(And I canna come ilka day to woo!)"
Wooing any lass would, just now, have been quite as secondary an affair with the singer as in the song,—a something par parenthèse.