Yes, that was one bright day in the dismal season, the day she tutored the Pilgrim widow in the newer commerce. There was a happy night to follow soon, and it is my grief that my pen cannot grasp the spirit of it, so that reading you would laugh with her and whiles be eerie. ’Tis true, there was little in the thing itself, as in most that at the age of twelve impress us for all our lives, but it met in some degree the expectations that her father’s tales of Scotland had sent home with her. Hitherto all had been natural and wellnigh commonplace that she had experienced, all except the folk so queer and kind and comical in a different way from those in Chicago, the sounds she could hear as she lay in her attic bed—the wind-call, and the honk of geese, and the feeling of an island hopelessly remote from the new bright world that best she knew,—remote and lost, a speck on the sea far, far from great America. The last things vaguely troubled her. For she was child enough as yet to shiver at things not touched by daylight nor seemingly made plain by the common-sense of man. She could laugh at the ghosts that curdled the blood of the maid of Colonsay; and yet at times, by an effort of the will, she could feel all Kate’s terror at some manifestation no more alarming than the cheep of mice or a death-watch ticking in a corner cupboard. These were but crude and vulgar fears, self-encouraged little actress terrors. It took more than the hint of ghost or the menace of the ticking insect in the wood to wake in her the feeling of worlds unrealised, encompassing, that she could get from casual verses in her Auntie Ailie’s book of Scottish ballads, or find o’erwhelm her of a sudden on looking from her window into the garden bare and pallid below the moon.

This night there should be moon according to the penny almanac, and Wanton Wully lit no lamps, but went home for a good sleep to himself, as his saying went, and left the burgh to such illumination as should come to it by the caprice of the clouds. It lay, the little place, for most of the night in darkness: a mirk so measureless deep, when the shops were shut, that the red-lit skylight windows at the upper end of the town seemed by some miracle to lift themselves and soar into the heavens—square, monstrous flitting stars to the vision of Bud, as she stood with Auntie Ailie at the door watching for Uncle Dan’s return from his office. To bring the soaring windows back to their natural situation, she had to stand a little way inside the lobby and establish their customary place against the darkness by the lintel of the door.

From the other side of the church came a sound of dull monotonous drumming—no cheerful rhythmic beat like the drumming of John Taggart, but a mournful thumping, fitful in flaws of the bland night wind.

“What’s that, Auntie?” she asked.

“The guizards,” said Miss Ailie, looking down upon her in the lobby light with a smile she could not see. “Did you never hear of the guizards, Bud?”

Bud had never heard of the guizards; that was one thing, surely, her father had forgotten. She had heard of Hallowe’en, she said, when further questioned. Wasn’t it the night for ducking into tubs for apples? The Pilgrim widow had told her Hallowe’en was coming, and it was for Hallowe’en she had sold so many nuts and apples; but the widow said she felt ashamed to do it, for Hallowe’en was not approved of by the Mission, being idolatrous and gay. “Is it very gay?” asked Bud anxiously.“So I used to think it,” said her aunt.

“Then I s’pose it must be wicked,” said the child regretfully. “I’d have expected you’d have Hallowe’en night here in the house if it hadn’t been very bad. That widow did me a lot of good, showing me what a heap of happy things are full of sin. She knew them all! I s’pose she got them in the tracts. Yes, she did me a lot of good; I—I almost wish I hadn’t met that widow.”

“Do you feel wicked when you’re gay?” asked Miss Ailie.

“Mercy on us! not a mite!” said Bud. “I feel plumb full of goodness when I’m gay; but that’s my youth and innocence. The widow says it is, and I guess what she says goes.”

“Still, do you know, my dear, I’d risk a little gaiety now and then,” said Auntie Ailie. “Who knows? The widow, though a worthy lady, is what in Scotland we call an auld wife, and it’s generally admitted that auld wives of either sex have no monopoly of wisdom. If you’re wanting pious guidance, Bud, I don’t know where you’ll get it better than from Auntie Bell; and she fairly dotes on Hallowe’en and the guizards. By-and-by you’ll see the guizards, and—and—well, just wait and we’ll find what else is to be seen. I do wish your Uncle Dan would hurry.”

The street was quite deserted, but did not show its vacancy until the clouds for a moment drifted off the moon that rolled behind the steeple. Then the long grey stretch of tenements came out unreal and pale on the other side of the street, their eaves and chimneys throwing inky shadows, their red-lit windows growing of a sudden wan. Over them hung the ponderous kirk, the master shadow, and all—the white-harled walls, the orange windows, the glittering cold and empty street—seemed like the vision of a dream. Then the clouds wrapped up the moon again, and the black was the black of Erebus. But as it fell, the dull drums seemed to come nearer, and from the head of the street, the windy corner where Uncle Dan had his office, small moons came, purple and golden, fantastically carved. They ran from house to house, and grouped in galaxies, or singly fell apart, swinging and giddy orbs. For a moment Bud looked at them bewildered, then gave a happy scream.

“The lanterns! the lanterns! look at the lanterns, Auntie. Is that Hallowe’en?”

“That’s part of it, at least,” said her Aunt. “These are the guizards with their turnip lanterns; they’re going round the houses singing; by-and-by we’ll hear them.”

“My! I wish to goodness I had a lantern like that. To swing a lantern like that ’d feel like being a lighthouse or the statue of Liberty at New York. I’d rather have a turnip lantern than a raft of dolls.”

“Did you never have one?”

“No,” said Bud sorrowfully. “You have no idea what a poor mean place Chicago is—not a thing but common electric light!” and Miss Ailie smiled gleefully to herself again like one possessed of a lovely secret. “I wish that brother of mine would come quickly,” she said, and at the moment he came out of the darkness to them with a comical look of embarrassment in his face and in his hand an unlighted turnip lantern!

“Here, Bud,” said he, “take this, quickly, before some silly body sees me with it and thinks it’s for myself. I have the name, I know, of being daft enough already, and if it gets about the country that Daniel Dyce was going round at Hallowe’en with a turnip lantern, they would think he had lost his head in a double sense and it would be very bad for business.”

“Uncle!” cried the child in ecstasy, “you’re the loveliest, sweetest man in the whole wide world.”

“I daresay,” said he. “I have been much admired when I was younger. But in this case don’t blame me. I wash my hands of the responsibility. I got my orders for that thing from your Auntie Bell.”“My! ain’t it cute? Did you make it?” asked Bud, surveying the rudely carved exterior with delight, and her uncle, laughing, put on his glasses to look at it himself.

“No,” said he, “though I’ve made a few of them in my time. All that’s needed is a knife or a mussel-shell, and a dose of Gregory’s Mixture in the morning.”

“What’s the Gregory’s Mixture for?”

“In making a turnip lantern you eat the whole inside of it,” said Mr Dyce. “Perhaps I might have made this one myself if it wasn’t that I know I would hate to see the inside wasted, and still I have mind of the Gregory. I bought the lantern from a boy at the head of the street who was looking very gash and ill, and seemed suspiciously glad to get quit of it. I’m thinking that his Gregory’s nearly due.”

Bud hardly listened—she was so taken up with her gift. She pounced at the handle of the kitchen door and found it snibbed within. “Kate! Kate!” she cried, “let me in to light my lantern.”

Kate was to be heard moving within, and there was a curious sound of giggling, but no answer.

“Open the door, quick, quick!” cried Bud again; and this time Auntie Bell, inside, said, “Yes, open, Kate, I think we’re ready.”

The door of the kitchen opened, and before the eyes of the child was a spectacle the more amazing and delightful since all day they had taken pains to keep the preparations secret. A dozen children, who had been smuggled in by the back-door in the close, were seated round a tub of water with floating apples, and they were waiting her presence to begin their fun.

Oh, how happy was that hour! But not just then came the thrill of which I’m thinking. It was not the laughter and the ducking in the tub, the discoveries of rings and buttons, thimbles, and scuddy little dolls and silver pieces hidden in the mound of champed potatoes Kate had cooked; nor the supper that followed, nor the mating of nuts on the fire-ribs that gave the eerie flavour of old time and the book of ballads. She liked them all; her transport surely was completed when the guizards entered black-faced, garmented as for a masque, each thumping a sheepskin stretched on a barrel-hoop—the thing we call a dallan. She had never discovered before what a soul of gaiety was in Auntie Bell, demure so generally, practising sobriety, it might seem, as if she realised her daffing days were over and it was time for her to remember all her years. To-night Miss Bell outdid even Ailie in her merriment, led the games in the spacious kitchen, and said such droll things, and kept the company in such a breeze that Ailie cried at last, “I think, Bell, that you’re fey!”

“Indeed, and I daresay you’re right,” admitted Bell, sinking in a chair exhausted. “At my time of life it’s daft; I have not laughed so much since I was at Barbara Mushet’s seminary.”

Not these things, but the half-hour after, was what made the evening memorable for the child. Nothing would satisfy her but that she should light her lantern and convoy the other children home, so Kate went with her, and the happy band went through the street, each dropping off at her own house front till the last was gone, and then Bud and the maid turned back.

But Kate had a project in her mind that had been there all night since she had burned two nuts for herself and Charles in the kitchen fire, and found them willing to flame quite snug together. That so far, was satisfactory, but she wanted more assurance of the final triumph of her love. There was, it seemed, a skilful woman up the lane who knew spells and magic, read tea-cups and the cards, and could unravel dreams. Notably was she good at Hallowe’en devices, and Bud must come and see her, for it would not take a minute.

They found their way by the light of the lantern to the spaewife’s door, and to a poor confidant of fate and fortune surely, since she had not found them kinder to herself, for she dwelt in a hovel where foolish servant-girls came at night with laughter and fears to discover what the future held for them. Bud, standing on the floor in the circle of light from her own lantern, watched the woman drop the white of an egg in a glass of water. In the clot of the albumen, which formed some wavering vague figures, she peered and found, she said, the masts of ships and a crowded harbour, and that meant a sailor husband.

“Was I not sure of it!” cried Kate, triumphant; but that was not the end of the ceremony, for she was bidden to sip a little from the glass, without swallowing, and go dumb into the night till she heard the Christian name of a man, and that was the name of the sailor husband. Kate sipped from the glass of destiny, and passed with Bud into the darkness of the lane. It was then there came to the child the delicious wild eerieness that she was beginning now to coax to her spirit whenever she could, and feed her fancies on. The light of the lantern only wanly illumined the lane they hurried through; so plain and grey and ancient and dead looked the houses pressing on either hand with windows shuttered, that it seemed to Bud she had come by magic on a shell as empty of life as the armour in the castle hall. By-and-by the servant, speechless, stopped at a corner listening. No sound of human life for a moment, but then a murmur of voices up the town, to which on an impulse she started running with Lennox at her heels, less quickly since the light of her lantern must be nursed from the wind. Bud fell behind in the race for the voice of fate; the sound of the footsteps before her died away in the distance, and her light went out, and there she stood alone for the first time in the dark of Scotland—Scotland where witches still wrought spells! A terror that was sweet to think of in the morning, whose memory she cherished all her days, seized on her, and she knew that all the ballad book was true! One cry she gave, that sounded shrilly up the street—it was the name of Charles, and Kate, hearing it, gulped and came back.

“I guessed that would fetch you,” said Bud, panting. “I was so scared I had to say it, though I s’pose it means I’ve lost him for a husband.”

“My stars! you are the clever one!” said the grateful maid.