FOR MAYME, READ MARY
I
Mayme Mccartney was a bad little good girl. She inspired (I trust)
esteem for her goodness. But it was for her hardy and happy impudence,
her bent for ingenious mischief, her broad and catholic disrespect for
law, conventions, proprieties and persons, and the glint of the devil in
her black eyes that we really loved her. Such is the perversity of human
nature in Our Square. I am told that it is much the same elsewhere.
She first came into public notice by giving (unsolicited) a most
scandalous and spirited imitation of old Madame Tallafferr, aforetime of
the Southern aristocracy, in the act of rebuking her landlord, the
insecticidal Boggs ("Boggs Kills Bugs" in his patent of nobility), for
eating peanuts on his own front steps. She then (earnestly solicited by
a growing audience) put on impromptu sketches of the Little Red Doctor
diagnosing internal complications in a doodle-bug; of MacLachan (drunk)
singing "The Cork Leg" and MacLachan (sober) repenting thereof; of
Bartholomew Storrs offering samples of his mortuary poesy to a bereaved
second-cousin; and, having decked out her chin in cotton-batten whiskers
(limb of Satan!), of myself proffering sage counsel and pious
admonitions to Our Square at large. Having concluded, she sat down on a
bench and coughed. And the Little Red Doctor, who, from the shelter of a
shrub had observed her presentation of his little idiosyncrasies, drew
nearer and looked at her hard.
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