JAMES M. BRUCE.

BLOOMING.

    A little seed lay underneath the ground,
      While from the south a mild wind-current blew,
      And from the tropics to the northward flew
    Long, angular lines of wild-fowl with a sound
    Of silken wings.  About that time the sun
      Put forth a shining finger, and did stir
    The sleeping soil to effort; whereupon
      The seed made roots like webs of gossamer,
    Shot up a stem, and flourished leaf and flower. 
      Now look, O sweet! see what your eyes have done
    With just one ray of their mysterious power
      Upon the germ of my heart’s passion thrown! 
    Through all my frame steal roots of pure desire: 
    My dreams are blooms that shake and shine like fire.

MAURICE THOMPSON

FELIPA.

Christine and I found her there.  She was a small, dark-skinned, yellow-eyed child, the offspring of the ocean and the heats, tawny, lithe and wild, shy yet fearless—­not unlike one of the little brown deer that bounded through the open reaches of the pine barren behind the house.  She did not come to us—­we came to her:  we loomed into her life like genii from another world, and she was partly afraid and partly proud of us.  For were we not her guests?—­proud thought!—­and, better still, were we not women?  “I have only seen three women in all my life,” said Felipa, inspecting us gravely, “and I like women.  I am a woman too, although these clothes of the son of Pedro make me appear as a boy:  I wear them on account of the boat and the hauling in of the fish.  The son of Pedro being dead at a convenient age, and his clothes fitting me, what would you have?  It was manifestly a chance not to be despised.  But when I am grown I shall wear robes long and beautiful like the senora’s.”  The little creature was dressed in a boy’s suit of dark-blue linen, much the worse for wear, and torn.

“If you are a girl, why do you not mend your clothes?” I said.

“Do you mend, senora?”

“Certainly:  all women sew and mend.”

“The other lady?”

Christine laughed as she lay at ease upon the brown carpet of pine needles, warm and aromatic after the tropic day’s sunshine.  “The child has divined me already, Catherine,” she said.

Christine was a tall, lissome maid, with an unusually long stretch of arm, long sloping shoulders and a long fair throat:  her straight hair fell to her knees when unbound, and its clear flaxen hue had not one shade of gold, as her clear gray eyes had not one shade of blue.  Her small, straight, rose-leaf lips parted over small, dazzlingly white teeth, and the outline of her face in profile reminded you of an etching in its distinctness, although it was by no means perfect according to the rules of art.  Still, what a comfort it was, after the blurred outlines