“Oh, what fun! what fun!  I wish I could see them.”

“You would be right glad, Missie, I can tell you, if you had been three or four months aboard a vessel with nothing but dry biscuits and salt junk, and may be a tin of preserved vegetables just to keep it wholesome, to see the black fellows come grinning alongside with their boats and canoes all full of oranges and limes and grape-fruit and cocoanuts.  Doesn’t one’s mouth fairly water for them?”

“Do please sit down, there’s a good Mother Bunch, and tell me all about them.  Come, please do.”

“Suppose I did, Miss Lucy, where would your poor uncle’s preserved ginger be, that no one knows from real West Indian ginger?”

“Oh, let me come into your room, and you can tell me all the time you are doing the ginger.

“It is very hot there, Missie.”

“That will be more like some of the places.  I’ll suppose I’m there!  Look, Mrs. Bunker! here’s a whole green sea; the tiniest little dots all over it.”

“Dots?  You’d hardly see all over one of those dots if you were in one.  That’s the South Sea, Miss Lucy, and those are the loveliest isles, except, may be, the West Indies, that ever I saw.”

“Tell me about them, please,” entreated Lucy.  “Here’s one; it’s name is—­is Isabel—­such a little wee one.”

“I can’t tell you much of those South Sea Isles, Missie, as I made only one voyage among them, when Bunker chartered the Penguin for the sandalwood trade; and we did not touch at many, for the natives were fierce and savage, and thought nothing of coming down with arrows and spears at a boat’s crew.  So we only went to such islands as the missionaries had been to, and had made the people more gentle and civil.”

“Tell me all about it,” said Lucy, following the old woman hither and thither as she bustled about, talking all the time, and stirring her pan of ginger over the hot plate.

How it happened, it is not easy to say.  The room was very warm, and Mother Bunch went on talking as she stirred, and a steam rose up, and by and by it seemed to Lucy that she had a great sneezing fit; and when she looked again into the smoke, what did she see but two little black figures, faces, heads, and feet all black, but with an odd sort of white garment round their waists, and some fine red and green feathers sticking out of their wooly heads.

“Mrs. Bunker, Mrs. Bunker!” she cried; “what’s this?  Who are these ugly figures?”

“Ugly!” said the foremost; and though it must have been some strange language, it sounded like English to Lucy.  “Is that the way little white girl speaks to boy and girl that have come all the way from Isabel to see her?”

“Oh, indeed! little Isabel boy, I beg your pardon.  I didn’t know you were real, nor that you could understand me!  I am so glad to see you.  Hush, Don! don’t bark so!”

“Pig, pig; I never heard a pig squeak like that,” said the black stranger.