Loe raamatut: «The Daft Days», lehekülg 13

CHAPTER XXIII

Ta-ran-ta-ra! Ta-ran-ta-ra!

The world is coming for Lennox Dyce, the greedy world, youth’s first and worst beguiler, that promises so much, but at the best has only bubbles to give, which borrow a moment the splendour of the sun, then burst in the hands that grasp them; the world that will have only our bravest and most clever bairns, and takes them all from us one by one. I have seen them go – scores of them, boys and girls, their foreheads high, and the sun on their faces, and never one came back. Now and then returned to the burgh in the course of years a man or woman who bore a well-known name, and could recall old stories, but they were not the same, and even if they were not disillusioned, there was that in their flushed prosperity which ill made up for the bright young spirits quelled.

Ta-ran-ta-ra! Ta-ran-ta-ra!

Yes, the world is coming, sure enough – on black and yellow wheels, with a guard red-coated who bugles through the glen. It is coming behind black horses, with thundering hooves and foam-flecked harness, between bare hills, by gurgling burns and lime-washed shepherd dwellings, or in the shadow of the woods that simply stand where they are placed by God and wait. It comes in a fur-collared coat – though it is autumn weather – and in a tall silk hat, and looks amused at the harmless country it has come to render discontent.

Ta-ran-ta-ra! Ta-ran-ta-ra!

Go back, world go back, and leave the little lass among her dreams, with hearts that love and cherish. Go back, with your false flowers and your gems of paste. Go back, world, that for every ecstasy exacts a pang!

There were three passengers on the coach – the man with the fur collar who sat on the box beside the driver, and the Misses Duff behind. I am sorry now that once I thought to make you smile at the pigeon hens, for to-day I’m in more Christian humour and my heart warms to them, seeing them come safely home from their flight afar from their doo-cot, since they it was who taught me first to make these symbols on the paper, and at their worst they were but a little stupid, like the most of us at times, and always with the best intent. They had been to Edinburgh; they had been gone two weeks – their first adventure in a dozen years. Miss Jean was happy, bringing back with her a new crochet pattern, a book of Views, a tooth gold-filled (she was so proud and spoke of it so often that it is not rude to mention it), and a glow of art she had got from an afternoon tea in a picture-gallery full of works in oil. Amelia’s spoils were a phrase that lasted her for years – it was that Edinburgh was “redolent of Robert Louis,” the boast that she had heard the great MacCaskill preach, and got a lesson in the searing of harmless woods with heated pokers. Such are the rewards of travel: I have come home myself with as little for my time and money.

But between them they had brought back something else – something to whisper about lest the man in front should hear, and two or three times to look at as it lay in an innocent roll beside the purse in Miss Amelia’s reticule. It might have been a serpent in its coils, so timidly they glanced in at it, and snapped the bag shut with a kind of shudder.

“At least it’s not a very large one,” whispered Miss Jean, with the old excuse of the unhappy lass who did the deadly sin.

“No,” said her sister, “it may, indeed, be called quite – quite diminutive. The other he showed us was so horribly large and – and vulgar, the very look of it made me almost faint. But, oh I wish we could have dispensed with the horrid necessity. After twe – after so many years it looks like a confession of weakness. I hope there will be no unpleasant talk about it.”

“But you may be sure there will, Amelia Duff,” said her sister. “They’ll cast up Barbara Mushet to us; she will always be the perfect teacher – ”

“The paragon of all the virtues.”

“And it is such a gossiping place.”

“Indeed it is,” said Miss Amelia. “It is always redolent of – of scandal.”

“I wish you had never thought of it,” said Miss Jean, with a sigh and a vicious little shake of the reticule. “I am not blaming you, remember, ’Melia; if we are doing wrong the blame of it is equally between us, except perhaps a little more for me, for I did think the big one was better value for the money. And yet it made me grue, it looked so – so dastardly.”

“Jean,” said her sister solemnly, “if you had taken the big one, I would have marched out of the shop affronted. If it made you grue, it made me shudder. Even with the small one, did you notice how the man looked at us? I thought he felt ashamed to be selling such a thing: perhaps he has a family. He said they were not very often asked for. I assure you I felt very small, the way he said it.”

Once more they bent their douce brown hats together over the reticule and looked timidly in on the object of their shames and fears. “Well, there it is, and it can’t be helped,” said Miss Jean at last, despairingly. “Let us hope and trust there will not be too frequent need for it, for, I assure you, I have neither the strength nor inclination.” She snapped the bag shut again, and, glancing up, saw the man with the fur collar looking over his shoulder at them.

“Strikes me, ladies,” he said, “the stage coach, as an easy mark for the highwaymen who used to permeate these parts, must have been a pretty merry proposition; they’d be apt to stub their toes on it if they came sauntering up behind. John here” – with an inclination of his head towards the driver – “tells me he’s on schedule time, and I allow he’s making plenty fuss clicking his palate, but I feel I want to get out and heave rocks at his cattle, so’s they’d get a better gait on ’em.”

Miss Jean was incapable of utterance; she was still too much afraid of a stranger who, though gallantly helping them to the top of the coach at Maryfield, could casually address herself and Miss Amelia as “dears,” thrust cigars on the guard and driver, and call them John and George at the very first encounter.

“We – we think this is fairly fast,” Miss Amelia ventured, surprised at her own temerity.. “It’s nineteen miles in two hours, and if it’s not so fast as a railway train it lets you enjoy the scenery. It is very much admired, our scenery, it’s so – it’s so characteristic.”

“Sure!” said the stranger, “it’s pretty tidy scenery as scenery goes, and scenery’s my forte. But I’d have thought that John here ’d have all this part of Caledonia stern and wild so much by heart he’d want to rush it and get to where the houses are; but most the time his horses go so slow they step on their own feet at every stride.”

“Possibly the coach is a novelty to you,” suggested Miss Amelia, made wondrous brave by two weeks’ wild adventuring in Edinburgh. “I – I take you for an American.”

“So did my wife, and she knew, for she belonged out mother’s place,” said the stranger, laughing. “You’ve guessed right, first time. No, the coach is no novelty to me; I’ve been up against a few in various places. If I’m short of patience and want more go just at present, it’s because I’m full of a good joke on an old friend I’m going to meet at the end of these obsequies.”

“Obsequies?” repeated Miss Amelia, with surprise, and he laughed again.

“At the end of the trip,” he explained. “This particular friend is not expecting me, because I hadn’t a post-card, hate a letter, and don’t seem to have been within shout of a telegraph office since I left Edinburgh this morning.”

“We have just come from Edinburgh ourselves,” Miss Jean chimed in.

“So!” said the stranger, throwing his arm over the back of his seat to enter more comfortably into the conversation. “It’s picturesque. Pretty peaceful, too. But it’s liable to be a little shy of the Thespian muse. I didn’t know more than Cooper’s cow about Edinburgh when I got there last Sunday fortnight, but I’ve gone perusing around a bit since; and say, my! she’s fine and old! I wasn’t half a day in the city when I found out that when it came to the real legit. Queen Mary was the king-pin of the outfit in Edinburgh. Before I came to this country I couldn’t just place Mary; sometimes she was Bloody, and sometimes she was Bonnie, but I suppose I must have mixed her up with some no-account English queen of the same name.”

“Edinburgh,” said Miss Amelia, “is redolent of Mary Queen of Scots – and Robert Louis.”

“It just is!” he said. “There’s a little bedroom she had in the Castle yonder, no bigger than a Chicago bathroom. Why, there’s hardly room for a nightmare in it – a skittish nightmare ’d kick the transom out. There doesn’t seem to be a single dramatic line in the whole play that Mary didn’t have to herself. She was the entire cast, and the spot light was on her for the abduction scene, the child-widow scene, the murder, the battle, and the last tag at Fotheringay. Three husbands and a lot of flirtations that didn’t come to anything; her portrait everywhere, and the newspapers tracking her up like old Sleuth from that day to this! I guess Queen Lizzie put her feet in it when she killed Mary, – for Mary’s the star-line in history, and Lizzie’s mainly celebrated for spoiling a good Prince Albert coat on Walter Raleigh.”

He spoke so fast, he used such curious words and idioms which the Misses Duff had never heard before nor read in books, that they were sure again he was a dreadful person. With a sudden thought of warnings to “Beware of Pickpockets” she had seen in Edinburgh, Miss Amelia clutched so hard at the chain of the reticule which held their purse as well as their mystery that it broke, and the bag fell over the side of the coach and, bursting open, scattered its contents on the road unobserved by the guard, whose bugle at the moment was loudly flourishing for the special delectation of a girl at work in a neighbouring corn-field.

“Hold hard, John,” said the American, and before the coach had quite stopped he was down on the highway recovering the little teachers’ property.

The serpent had unwound its coils; it lay revealed in all its hideousness – a teacher’s tawse!

At such a sad exposure its owners could have wept. They had never dreamt a tawse could look so vulgar and forbidding as it looked when thus exposed to the eye of man on the King’s highway.

“Oh, thank you so much,” said Miss Jean. “It is so kind of you.”

“Exceedingly kind, courteous beyond measure, – we are more than obliged to you,” cooed Miss Amelia, with a face like a sunset as she rolled the leather up with nervous fingers.

“Got children, ma’am?” asked the American seriously, as the coach proceeded on its way.

Miss Amelia Duff made the best joke of her life without meaning it. “Twenty-seven,” said she, with an air of great gratitude, and the stranger smiled.

“School-ma’rm. Now that’s good, that is; it puts me in mind of home, for I appreciate school-ma’rms so heartily that about as soon as I got out of the school myself I married one. I’ve never done throwing bouquets at myself about it ever since, but I’m sorry for the mites she could have been giving a good time to as well as their education if it hadn’t been that she’s so much mixed up with me. What made me ask about children was that – that medieval animator. I haven’t seen one for years and years, not since old Deacon Springfield found me astray in his orchard one night and hiking for a short cut home. I thought they’d been abolished by the treaty of Berlin.”

Miss Amelia thrust it hurriedly into the reticule. “We have never used one all our life,” said she, “but now we fear we have to, and, as you see, it’s quite thin – it’s quite a little one.”

“So it is,” said the stranger solemnly. “It’s thin, – it’s translucent, you might say; but I guess the kiddies are pretty little too, and won’t be able to make any allowance for the fact that you could have had a larger size if you wanted. It may be light on the fingers and mighty heavy on the feelings.”

“That’s what you said,” whispered Miss Amelia to her sister.

“As moral suasion, belting don’t cut ice,” went on the American. “It’s generally only a safety-valve for a wrothy grown-up person with a temper and a child that can’t hit back”

“That’s what you said,” whispered Miss Jean to Miss Amelia, and never did two people look more miserably guilty.

“What beats me,” said the stranger, “is that you should have got along without it so far, and think it necessary now.”

“Perhaps – perhaps we won’t use it,” said Miss Jean.

“Except as – as a sort of symbol,” added her sister. “We would never have dreamt of it if children nowadays were not so different from what they used to be.”

“I guess folk’s been saying that quite a while,” said the American. “Children never were like what they used to be. I reckons old Mother Nature spits on her hands and makes a fresh start with each baby, and never turns out two alike. That’s why it’s fun to sit and watch ’em bloom. Pretty delicate blooms, too! Don’t bear much pawing; just give them a bit of shelter when the weather’s cold, a prop to lean against if they’re leggy and the wind’s high, and see that the fertiliser is the proper brand. Whether they’re going to turn out like the picture on the packet or just only weeds depends on the seedsman.”

“Oh, you don’t understand how rebellious they can be!” cried Miss Amelia with feeling. “And they haven’t the old deference to their elders that they used to have, – they’re growing bold and independent.”

“Depends on the elders, I suppose. Over here I think you folks think children come into the world just to please grown-ups and do what they’re told without any thinking. In America it’s looked at the other way about: the children are considerably more important than their elders, and the notion don’t do any harm to either, far as I can see. As for your rebels, ma’am, I’d cherish ’em: rebellion’s like a rash, it’s better out than in.”

Ta-ran-ta-ra! The bugle broke upon their conversation; the coach emerged from the wood and dashed down hill, and, wheeling through the arches, drew up at the inn.

The American helped the ladies to alight, took off his hat, bade them good-day, and turned to speak to his friend the driver, when a hand was placed on his sleeve, and a child with a dog at her feet looked up in his face.

“Jim! Why, Jim Molyneux!” cried Bud.

CHAPTER XXIV

For only a day or two the world (in a fur-lined collar) dwelt among us, but momentous was its advent to the household Molyneux came visiting. It was as if a high tide had swept the dwelling, Bell remarked when he was gone. You might see no outward difference; the furniture might still be as it was, and in the same position as Miss Bell had found it when her mother died, but none the less there was an unseen doleful wreckage. This unco man Molyneux changed the vital thing, the atmosphere, and the house with the brass knocker was never to be altogether just the same again. It is no discovery of mine that what may seem the smallest trifles play tremendous parts in destiny.

Even the town itself was some ways altered for a little by the whim that took the American actor to it. That he should be American and actor too foredoomed the greatness of his influence, since the combination stood for much that was mysterious, half fearful, half sublime, in our simple notions of the larger world. To have been the first alone would have endowed him with the charm of wonder and romance for most of us, who, at the very sight of the name America, even if it be only on a reaper or a can of beef, have some sense of a mightiness that the roar of London cannot rouse. But to be an actor too! earning easy bread by mimicry, and in enormous theatres, before light-headed folk that have made money – God knows how! – and prospered. Sinful a little, we allow, for there are doubts if the play-actor, having to paint his face and work late hours in gas-light, finally shall obtain salvation; sinful, and yet – and yet – so queer and clever a way of making out a living! It is no wonder if we looked on Mr Molyneux with that regard which by cities is reserved for shahs of a hundred wives, and royal vagabonds. Besides, consider how the way had been prepared for him by Bud! – a child, but a child who had shown already how wonderful must be the land that had swallowed up clever men like William Dyce and the brother of P. & A. MacGlashan. Had she not, by a single object-lesson in the Pilgrim widow’s warehouse, upset the local ways of commerce, so that now, in all the shops, the people were constantly buying things of which they had no earthly need; and the Pilgrim widow herself was put to the weekly trouble of washing her windows, so wasting time that might have been devoted to the Mission? Had she not shown that titled ladies were but human after all, and would not bite you if you cracked a joke politely with them? Had she not put an end to all the gallivanting of the maid of Colonsay, and given her an education that made her fit to court a captain? And, finally, had she not, by force of sheer example, made dumb and stammering bashfulness in her fellow pupils at the Sunday-school look stupid, and by her daily walk and conversation roused in them a new spirit of inquiry and independence that pleased their parents not so badly, and only the little twin teachers of the Pigeon Seminary could mistake for the kind of rebellion that calls for the application of the tawse?

Mr Molyneux might have no idea of it, but he was a lion for those few days of sequestration in what he thought the wilds. Miss Minto dressed her windows specially for his critical eye, and on the tickets of her autumn sales gave the name of “waist” to what had hitherto been a blouse or a garibaldi; P. & A. MacGlashan made the front of his shop like a wharf with piles of empty packing-cases to indicate a prosperous foreign and colonial trade; one morning Wanton Wully rang the bell at half-past five instead of six to prove how very wide-awake we were; and the band paraded once with a new tune, “Off to Philadelphia,” to show that when it came to gaiety we were not, though small, so very far behind New York.

But Jim Molyneux, going up and down the street with Lennox and the dog for cicerones, peered from under the rim of his hat, and summed all up to himself in the words, “Rube town” and “Cobwebopolis.”

Bell took warmly to him from the outset, so much was in his favour. For one thing he was spick and span, though not a jackanapes, with no long hair about him as she had expected, and with an honest eye and a good complexion that, for simple country ladies, readily pass as the guarantee of a being clean within. She forgave the disreputable part in him – the actor, since William had been one, and yet had taught his child her prayers; and she was willing to overlook the American, seeing William’s wife had suffered from the same misfortune. But, oh the blow she got when she unpacked what he called his grip, and found the main thing wanting!

“Where’s your Bible, Mr Molyneux?” she asked solemnly. “It’s not in your portmanteau?”

Again it was in his favour that he reddened, though the excuse he had to make was feeble.

“Dear me!” she said, shaking her head, with a sad sort of smile, “and you to be so regularly travelling! If I was your wife I would take you in hand! But perhaps in America there’s no need for a lamp to the feet and a light to the path.”

It was after their first supper, for which the patriot Bell had made a haggis, that her brother, for Molyneux’s information, said was thought to be composed of bagpipes boiled; Bud was gone to bed in the attic, and Molyneux was telling how he simply had to come.

“It’s my first time in Scotland,” said he, “and when ‘The Iron Hand’ lost its clutch on old Edina’s fancy, and the scenery was arrested, I wasn’t so sore about it as I might have been, since it gave me the opportunity of coming up here to see girly-girly. ‘I’ll skiddoo from the gang for a day or two,’ I said to the manager, when we found ourselves side-tracked, and he said that was all right, he’d wire me when he’d fixed a settlement; so I skiddid, and worked my way here with the aid of the American language, and a little Scotch – by absorption.”

“We have only one fault with your coming – that it was not sooner,” said Mr Dyce.

“And I’m pretty glad I came, if it was only to see what a credit Bud is to a Scottish training. Chicago’s the finest city on earth – in spots; America’s what our Fourth of July orators succinctly designate God’s Own, and since Joan of Arc there hasn’t been any woman better or braver than Mrs Molyneux. But we weren’t situated to give Bud a show like what she’d get in a settled home. We did our best, but we didn’t dwell, as you might say, on Michigan Avenue, and Mrs Molyneux’s a dear good girl, but she isn’t demonstratively domesticated. We suspected from what Bud’s father was, the healthiest place she could be was where he came from, and though we skipped some sleep, both of us, to think of losing her, now that I’m here and see her, I’m glad of it, for my wife and I are pretty much on the drift most the time in England as we were in the United States.”

“Yours is an exacting calling, Mr Molyneux,” said Mr Dyce. “It’s very much the same in all countries, I suppose?”

“It’s not so bad as stone-breaking, nor so much of a cinch as being a statesman,” said Mr Molyneux cheerfully, “but a man’s pretty old at it before he gives up hope of breaking out into a very large gun. I’ve still the idea myself that if I’m not likely to be a Booth or Henry Irving, I could make a pile at management. With a millionaire at my back for a mascot, and one strong star, I fancy I could cut a pretty wide gash through the English dramatic stage. You know our Mr Emerson said, ‘Hitch your waggon to a star.’ I guess if I got a good star bridled, I’d hitch a private parlour-car and a steam yacht on to her before she flicked an ear. Who wants a waggon, anyway?”

“A waggon’s fairly safe to travel in,” suggested Mr Dyce, twinkling through his glasses.

“So’s a hearse,” said Mr Molyneux quickly. “Nobody that ever travelled in a hearse complained of getting his funny-bone jolted or his feelings jarred, but it’s a mighty slow conveyance for live folks. That’s the only thing that seems to me to be wrong with this ’cute little British Kingdom: it’s pretty, and it’s what the school-marm on the coach would call redolent of the dear dead days beyond recall; and it’s plucky, – but it keeps the brakes on most the time, and don’t give its star a chance to amble. I guess it’s a fine, friendly, and crowded country to be born rich in, and a pretty peaceful and lonesome country to die poor in; but take a tenpenny car-ride out from Charing Cross and you’re in Lullaby Land, and the birds are building nests and carolling in your whiskers. Life’s short; it only gives a man time to wear through one pair of eyes, two sets of teeth, and a reputation, and I want to live every hour of it that I’m not conspicuously dead.”

They were silent in the parlour of the old house that had for generations sheltered very different ideals, and over the town went the call of the wild geese. The room, low-roofed, small-windowed, papered in dull green, curtained against the noises of the street, and furnished with the strong mahogany of Grandma Buntain, dead for sixty years, had ever to those who knew it best a soul of peace that is not sometimes found in a cathedral. They felt in it a sanctuary safe from the fret and tempest, the alarums and disillusions of the life out-bye. In the light of the shaded lamp hung over the table, it showed itself to its inmates in the way our most familiar surroundings will at certain crises – in an aspect fonder than ever it had revealed before. To Bell, resenting the spirit of this actor’s gospel, it seemed as if the room cried out against the sacrilege: even Ailie, sharing in her heart, if less ecstatically, the fervour for life at its busiest this stranger showed, experienced some inharmony. To Dan it was for a moment as if he heard a man sell cuckoo clocks by auction with a tombstone for his rostrum.

“Mr Molyneux,” said he, “you remind me, in what you say, of Maggie White’s husband. Before he died he kept the public-house, and on winter nights when my old friend Colin Cleland and his cronies would be sitting in the back room with a good light, a roaring fire, and an argument about Effectual Calling, so lively that it stopped the effectual and profitable call for Johnny’s toddy, he would come in chittering as it were with cold, and his coat-collar up on his neck, to say, ‘An awfu’ nicht outside! As dark as the inside o’ a cow, and as cauld as charity! They’re lucky that have fires to sit by.’ And he would impress them so much with the good fortune of their situation at the time that they would order in another round and put off their going all the longer, though the night outside, in truth, was no way out of the ordinary. I feel like that about this place I was born in, and its old fashions and its lack of hurry, when I hear you – with none of Johnny White’s stratagem – tell us, not how dark and cold is the world outside, but what to me, at the age of fifty-five, at any rate is just as unattractive. You’ll excuse me if, in a manner of speaking, I ring the bell for another round. Life’s short, as you say, but I don’t think it makes it look any the longer to run through the hours of it instead of leisurely daundering – if you happen to know what daundering is, Mr Molyneux – and now and then resting on the roadside with a friend and watching the others pass.”

“At fifty-five,” said Mr Molyneux agreeably, “I’ll perhaps think so too, but I can only look at it from the point of view of thirty-two. We’ve all got to move, at first, Mr Dyce. That reminds me of a little talk I had with Bud to-day. That child’s grown, Mr Dyce, – grown a heap of ways: she’s hardly a child any longer.”

“Tuts! She’s nothing else!” exclaimed Miss Bell, with some misgiving. “When I was her age I was still at my sampler in Barbara Mushet’s.”

“Anyhow she’s grown. And it seems to me she’s about due for a little fresh experience. I suppose you’ll be thinking of sending her to one of those Edinburgh schools to have the last coat of shellac put on her education?”

“What put that in your head? Did she suggest it herself?” asked Mr Dyce quickly, with his head to one side in his cross-examination manner.

“Well, she did, – but she didn’t know it,” said Mr Molyneux. “I guess about the very last thing that child ’d suggest to anybody would be that she wanted to separate herself from folk she loves so much as you; but, if there’s one weakness about her, it is that she can’t conceal what she thinks, and I’d not been twenty minutes in her society before I found out she had the go-fever pretty bad. I suspect a predisposition to that complaint and a good heart was all her father and mother left her, and lolling around and dwelling on the past isn’t apt to be her foible. Two or three years in the boarding-school arena would put the cap sheaf on the making of that girl’s character, and I know, for there’s my wife, and she had only a year and a half. If she’d had longer I guess she’d have had more sense than marry me. Bud’s got almost every mortal thing a body wants here, I suppose, – love in lumps, a warm moist soil, and all the rest of it; but she wants to be hardened-off, and for hardening-off a human flower there’s nothing better than a three-course college, where the social breeze is cooler than it is at home.”

Miss Bell turned pale – the blow had come! Dan looked at her with a little pity, for he knew she had long been fearfully expecting it.

“Indeed!” said she, “and I do not see the need for any such thing for a long while yet. Do you, Ailie?” But Ailie had no answer, and that was enough to show what she thought.

“I know how it feels at first to think of her going away from home,” continued Mr Molyneux, eager to be on with a business he had no great heart for. “Bless you, I know how my wife felt about it, – she cried like the cherubim and seraphim. Said it was snatching all the sunshine out of her life, and when I said, ‘Millicent Molyneux, what about hubby?’ she just said ‘Scat!’ and threw a couple of agonised throes. Now, Edinburgh’s not so very far away that you’d feel desolated if Bud went to a school there.”

“An unhealthy hole, with haars and horrible east wind,” said Miss Bell.

“Well, it isn’t the Pacific Slope, if it comes to climate,” admitted Mr Molyneux.

“No, but it’s the most beautiful city in the wide world, for all that,” cried Miss Bell, with such spirit that it cleared the air, and made her sister and her brother smile, for Molyneux, without his knowing it, had touched her in the very heart’s core of her national pride.

“You’re sure you are not mistaken, and that she would wish to go to school?” asked Mr Dyce.

“Do you doubt it yourself?” asked Molyneux slyly.

“No,” said Mr Dyce, “I know it well enough, but – but I don’t believe it,” and he smiled at his own paradox.

“I have her own words for it.”

“Then she’ll go!” said the lawyer firmly, as if a load was off his mind; and, oddly, there were no objections from his sisters. “You’re not to imagine, Mr Molyneux,” he went on, “that we have not thought of this before. It has for months been never out of our minds, as might be seen from the fact that we never mentioned it, being loth to take a step that’s going to make considerable difference here. It’s not that we feared we should die of ennui in her absence, for we’re all philosophers and have plenty to engage our minds as well as our activities, and though you might think us rather rusty here we get a good deal of fun with ourselves. She’ll go – oh, yes, of course she’ll go, – Ailie went, and she’s no’ muckle the waur o’t, as we say. I spent some time in the south myself, and the only harm it seems to have done me was to make me think too much perhaps of my native north. Taste’s everything, Mr Molyneux, and you may retort if you please that I’m like the other Scotsman who preferred his apples small and hard and sour. I think there’s no divine instruction, is there, Bell, about apples? and judgments regarding different countries and different places in them is mostly a subjective thing, like the estimate of beauty apart from its utility – ”