One of the gracious ladies thought not, decidedly:  in answer to my remonstrance, expressed in English, she said, “Teach a child like that, and you ruin her.”

“Ruin her?”

“Ruin her happiness—­the same thing.”

Felipa had a dog, a second self—­a great gaunt yellow creature of unknown breed, with crooked legs, big feet and the name Drollo.  What Drollo meant, or whether it was an abbreviation, we never knew, but there was a certain satisfaction in it, for the dog was droll:  the fact that the Minorcan title, whatever it was, meant nothing of that kind, made it all the better.  We never saw Felipa without Drollo.  “They look a good deal alike,” observed Christine—­“the same coloring.”

“For shame!” I said.

But it was true.  The child’s bronzed yellow skin and soft eyes were not unlike the dog’s, but her head was crowned with a mass of short black curls, while Drollo had only his two great flapping ears and his low smooth head.  Give him an inch or two more of skull, and what a creature a dog would be!  For love and faithfulness even now what man can match him?  But, although ugly, Felipa was a picturesque little object always, whether attired in boy’s clothes or in her own forlorn bodice and skirt.  Olive-hued and meagre-faced, lithe and thin, she flew over the pine barrens like a creature of air, laughing to feel her short curls toss and her thin childish arms buoyed up on the breeze as she ran, with Drollo barking behind.  For she loved the winds, and always knew when they were coming—­whether down from the north, in from the ocean, or across from the Gulf of Mexico:  she watched for them, sitting in the doorway, where she could feel their first breath, and she taught us the signal of the clouds.  She was a queer little thing:  we used to find her sometimes dancing alone out on the barren in a circle she had marked out with pine-cones, and once she confided to us that she talked to the trees.  “They hear,” she said in a whisper:  “you should see how knowing they look, and how their leaves listen.”

Once we came upon her most secret lair in a dense thicket of thorn-myrtle and wild smilax, a little bower she had made, where was hidden a horrible-looking image formed of the rough pieces of saw-palmetto grubbed up by old Bartolo from his garden.  She must have dragged these fragments thither one by one, and with infinite pains bound them together with her rude withes of strong marsh-grass, until at last she had formed a rough trunk with crooked arms and a sort of a head, the red hairy surface of the palmetto looking not unlike the skin of some beast, and making the creature all the more grotesque.  This fetich was kept crowned with flowers, and after this we often saw the child stealing away with Drollo to carry to it portions of her meals or a new-found treasure—­a sea-shell, a broken saucer, or a fragment of ribbon.  The food always mysteriously disappeared, and my suspicion is that Drollo used to go back secretly in the night and devour it, asking no questions and telling no lies:  it fitted in nicely, however, Drollo merely performing the ancient part of the priests of Jupiter, men who have been much admired.  “What a little pagan she is!” I said.