and smudged profiles many of us possess—­seen to best advantage, I think, in church on Sundays, crowned with flower-decked bonnets, listening calmly serene to favorite ministers, unconscious of noses!  When Christine had finished her laugh—­and she never hurried anything, but took the full taste of it—­she stretched out her arm carelessly and patted Felipa’s curly head.  The child caught the descending hand and kissed the long white fingers.

It was a wild place where we were, yet not new or crude—­the coast of Florida, that old-new land, with its deserted plantations, its skies of Paradise, and its broad wastes open to the changeless sunshine.  The old house stood on the edge of the dry land, where the pine barren ended and the salt marsh began:  in front curved the tide-water river that seemed ever trying to come up close to the barren and make its acquaintance, but could not quite succeed, since it must always turn and flee at a fixed hour, like Cinderella at the ball, leaving not a silver slipper, but purple driftwood and bright sea-weeds, brought in from the Gulf Stream outside.  A planked platform ran out into the marsh from the edge of the barren, and at its end the boats were moored; for although at high tide the river was at our feet, at low tide it was far away out in the green waste somewhere, and if we wanted it we must go and seek it.  We did not want it, however:  we let it glide up to us twice a day with its fresh salt odors and flotsam of the ocean, and the rest of the time we wandered over the barrens or lay under the trees looking up into the wonderful blue above, listening to the winds as they rushed across from sea to sea.  I was an artist, poor and painstaking:  Christine was my kind friend.  She had brought me South because my cough was troublesome, and here because Edward Bowne recommended the place.  He and three fellow-sportsmen were down at the Madre Lagoon, farther south; I thought it probable we should see him, without his three fellow-sportsmen, before very long.

“Who were the three women you have seen, Felipa?” said Christine.

“The grandmother, an Indian woman of the Seminoles who comes sometimes with baskets, and the wife of Miguel of the island.  But they are all old, and their skins are curled:  I like better the silver skin of the senora.”

Poor little Felipa lived on the edge of the great salt marsh alone with her grand-parents, for her mother was dead.  The yellow old couple were slow-witted Minorcans, part pagan, part Catholic, and wholly ignorant:  their minds rarely rose above the level of their orange trees and their fish-nets.  Felipa’s father was a Spanish sailor, and as he had died only the year before, the child’s Spanish was fairly correct, and we could converse with her readily, although we were slow to comprehend the patois of the old people, which seemed to borrow as much from the Italian tongue and the Greek as from its mother Spanish.  “I know a great deal,” Felipa remarked confidently, “for my father taught me.  He had sailed on the ocean out of sight of land, and he knew many things.  These he taught to me.  Do the gracious ladies think there is anything else to know?”