Felipa came bounding to meet me.  “What is his name?” she demanded.

“Bowne.”

“Buon—­Buona:  I cannot say it.”

“Bowne, child—­Edward Bowne.”

“Oh!  Eduardo:  I know that.  Eduardo—­Eduardo—­a name of honey.”

She flew off singing the name, followed by Drollo carrying his mistress’s palmetto basket in his big patient mouth; but when I passed the house a few moments afterward she was singing, or rather talking volubly of, another name—­“Miguel,” and “the wife of Miguel,” who were apparently important personages on the canvas of her life.  As it happened, I never really saw that wife of Miguel, who seemingly had no name of her own; but I imagined her.  She lived on a sandbar in the ocean not far from the mouth of our river; she drove pelicans like ducks with a long switch, and she had a tame eagle; she had an old horse also, who dragged the driftwood across the sand on a sledge, and this old horse seemed like a giant horse always, outlined as he ever was against the flat bar and the sky.  She went out at dawn, and she went out at sunset, but during the middle of the burning day she sat at home and polished sea-beans, for which she obtained untold sums:  she was very tall, she was very yellow, and she had but one eye.  These items, one by one, had been dropped by Felipa at various times, and it was with curiosity that I gazed upon the original Miguel, the possessor of this remarkable spouse.  He was a grave-eyed, yellow man, who said little and thought less, applying cui bono? to mental much as the city man applies it to bodily exertion, and therefore achieving, I think, a finer degree of inanition.  The tame eagle, the pelicans, were nothing to him, and when I saw his lethargic, gentle countenance my own curiosity about them seemed to die away in haze, as though I had breathed in an invisible opiate.  He came, he went, and that was all:  exit Miguel.

Felipa was constantly with us now.  She and Drollo followed the three of us wherever we went—­followed the two also whenever I stayed behind to sketch, as I often stayed, for in those days I was trying to catch the secret of the barrens:  a hopeless effort, I know it now.  “Stay with me, Felipa,” I said; for it was natural to suppose that the lovers might like to be alone. (I call them lovers for want of a better name, but they were more like haters:  however, in such cases it is nearly the same thing.) And then Christine, hearing this, would immediately call “Felipa!” and the child would dart after them, happy as a bird.  She wore her boy’s suit now all the time, because the senora had said she “looked well in it.”  What the senora really said was, that in boy’s clothes she looked less like a grasshopper.  But this had been translated as above by Edward Bowne when Felipa suddenly descended upon him one day and demanded to be instantly told what the gracious lady was saying about her; for she seemed to know by intuition when we spoke of her, although we talked in English and mentioned no names.  When told, her small face beamed, and she kissed Christine’s hand joyfully and bounded away.  Christine took out her beautiful handkerchief and wiped the spot.