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.