“Oh, oh, but I’m faling like a bit av chewed string,” sighed Judy. “Howiver, the party was a grand success and aven Tillytuck sitting down on a shate av fly-paper in the pantry where he did have no business to be and thin strutting pompous-like across the platform wid it stuck to his pants cudn’t be called inny refliction on Silver Bush. He did be purtinding to be mad about it but I’m belaving he did it on purpose to make a sinsation. Oh, oh, ye cud have knocked me down wid a feather whin I was after clearing up the supper dishes. I did be hearing a thud…and there was me fine Horace full lingth on the floor ye rubbed up so well, Patsy. ‘Tarrible slippy floor ye’ve got, woman,’ was all he said. Ye niver cud be telling if Horace was mad or if he wasn’t.”

“I like him,” said Pat, who had made up her mind about him when he talked of the well and the ferns.

“Pat, what on earth were you and Samuel MacLeod doing in the garden?” asked Rae.

“Oh, just moonlighting,” answered Pat, demure as an owl.

“I never saw anything so funny as the two of you dancing together. He looked like a windmill in a fit.”

“Don’t ye be making fun av the poor boy,” said Judy. “He can’t be hilping his long arms and legs. At that, it do be better than being sawed off. And while he cudn’t be said to talk he does be managing to get things said.”

“He gets them said all right,” thought Pat. But she heroically contented herself with thinking of it.

CHAPTER 22

Uncle Horace did not prove hard to entertain. When he was not talking over old times with dad or Uncle Tom or Judy he was reading sentimental novels…the more sentimental the better. When he had exhausted the Silver Bush library he borrowed from the neighbors. But the book David Kirk lent him did not please him at all.

“They don’t get married at the last,” he grumbled. “I don’t care a hoot for a book where they don’t get properly married…or hanged…at the last. These modern novels that leave everything unfinished annoy me. And the heroines are all too old. I don’t like ’em a day over sixteen.”

“But things are often unfinished in real life,” said Pat, who had picked up the idea from David.

“All the more reason why they should come right in books,” said Uncle Horace testily. “Real life! We get enough real life living. I like fairy tales. I like a nice snug tidy ending in a book with all the loose ends tucked in. Judy’s yarns never left things in the air. That’s why she’s always been such a corking success as a storyteller.”