A Song of Sixpence [antikvár]

Every evening at six o'clock a sense of expectancy filled the house, brightening the long, vague and dreamy afternoon. As I went into the front room my mother, moving about the kitchen preparing our supper, began to sing. It was something about a miller's daughter who lay down and died. She sang these sad Scottish songs in so lively a manner and with such natural cheerfulness they sounded gay. I stood on the hassock to look out of the window. Although I was to go to school next week I still had need of the hassock. The road to the village station was empty except for Macintosh's dog, asleep in the shade of the sycamore tree outside the smithy. Beyond the station with its beds of sweet william and yellow calceolarias lay the wide sweep of deserted shore, and beyond that the Clyde estuary, enlivened at present by a white-funnelled paddle steamer, a Broomielaw boat, going downstream. Presently a figure appeared, not the expected one but still a friend -indeed my only ?iend, Maggie, or as she was called most un-jusdy by the 'bad' boys, Mad Maggie, a big awkward girl of thirteen who, festooned with milk-cans from Snoddie's farm, was now squeezing through the bars of the shut gates of the level crossing. This was a short cut so strictly forbidden me I watched reprovingly as she dragged up the road on the start of her evening milk round. Passing our house, one of four little villas primly in a row, she saw me at the window and, with a dull clank of cans, waved an arm in greeting. I had begun to wave back when there came a shrill whistle. My eyes, diverted from Maggie, picked up a plume of steam beneath which a dark maroon serpent snaked slowly round the curve of the railway line. Painfully, as though out of breath, it puffed to the single platform. In the year 1900 only the slowest North British trains stopped at Ardencaple village. As sometimes happened, my father was the only passenger to