"Evenin', ma'am. 'Tis dreadful cold out, be it not?"
The voice was lilting, young and warm, that of a pleasant middle-aged man.
"Mind if I step inside, then? I fear t' perish, and if ma'am would be much obliged as t' preserve the life of an 'onest workin' rapscallion…"
The girl had no choice but to stand aside, and the strange man walked in with a springy step unlike the usual gait of one who had undergone a midnight traipse into a freezing woodland. The man stamped his feet, as if doing a jig, then removed his hat (which was a dull purplish-red) to brush snow off the brim. To the girl's surprise, the man was not middle-aged : in fact, he was about as old as her grandfather, with a grizzled mane of grayish hair that curled down to his collar, and a wrinkled, but not ugly or mishappen face that bespoke many laughs and smiles. The man's nose was neither squashed nor broken, a peculiarity in these parts, and he looked always as if about to burst into song. The girl imagined if Saint Nicholas had lost weight and gone traveling, he would look like this. Most strangely, the man's eyes : though a rich shade of copper, they seemed odd, breumy, as if one had diluted them by pouring in a small quantity of milk.
"Fire's out, then?" Asked the man, wheeling suddenly.
The girl nodded, shivering, as a chille wind had crept through the door.
"Sorry 'bout that," the man muttered apologetically, and stabbed at the door with his cane, closing it with a cold snap.
The man walked to the hearth, did a little jig, and spit onto the wood. Immediately, the blazing fire returned, as jolly as if it had never gone out. The man's eyes suddenly flashed a silvery-red as the light hit them. They were like a cat's eyes, and when they flashed thus so, it was as if they had expanded to fill his face.
The man looked around and winked. " 'Preciate it if y' didn' mention that t' anybody. Word get's around that there's a man with magic spit, I'll have me tongue cut out and dried, like a fresh walrus, ey?" The man laughed heartily, and the fire spurted briefly, as if in response.
The girl remembered her manners, and ,beggin' your pardon, sir, wagered that after such travel one would work up a turrible thirst, and would sir like a drink?
"Nah, I'm jus' passin' by on me way to ol' Saint Nick's."
The Girl blinked in surprise. Surely, Saint Nicholas was but a myth? A fable? The sort of story mothers told their children to make them behave, to make them wriggle with delight and fall asleep smiling?
The old man chuckled. "Nah, he's real, to be sure. Why wouldn' he be, ey?"
The girl had never heard someone ask such a question, and stammered out a reply that it was just one of those things : Everyone knew it.
The old man chuckled once more. "Ah, but people 'r' often strangely wrong, aren' they? Jus' becoz everybody says it doesn't make it any more th' truth, now does it?" He slammed the floor sharply with his cane, startling the girl and evoking a yelp from Nille. "I bet nobody says that there be men what can spit in hearths an' come up wi' fires, which is quite the same as everybody doesn't say there be men what can spit in hearths an' come up wi' fires. And the opposite o' that be that everybody does say there be men what can spit in hearths an' come up wi' fires, and if everybody and nobody are the same thing, who can y' b'lieve, ey?"
The girl was now thoroughly confused. Well, she was confused from the start, ever since the fire went out, but now things had sort of spiraled, and she had lost all track of the conversation around the second pass of the spitting in of hearths.
"An what abou' gravity? Or lightnin'? Know what those are? Well, nobody knows for sure, least of all those that came up wi' the names. When people can't quite understand somethin,' they makes sure that nobody else can. Everybody does it. Like Newton. He just muddled us up wi' his theories of 'universal gravitation,' but what is gravity, ey? What makes it? Nobody knows for sure. Or lightnin': we still don' understand quite what it is, we think we know, but do we? Or take people like Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, and their theories on th' human brain. They didn' explain nuthin' that wasn't thur fer anybody wi' half a brain to figure anyway, they just made up oodles o' psychobabble. No, sir, I don' need such nonsense. If I believe somethin,' t'will be becoz I've found proof meself, not cuz I'm told by jus' ordinary everybodies, or nobodies, or whatever they be."