Tom, her man, alternately petted and beat her.  She, no doubt, deserved both, for she was proud and haughty for a black gin, and as venomous at times as a scorpion.  His hand is heavy, and when he lifted it in anger poor “Little Jinny” suffered—­but suffered in silence.  Her chastisements were not frequent, but they seemed to increase her loyalty towards her lord and master.

From a European standpoint, “Little Jinny” had little of which to be vain.  She had a fuzzy head of hair.  Some, like fur, crept down across her brows, giving her face a singularly unbecoming cast.  I did not notice this peculiar uncomeliness until she was dying, and I felt then more than ever that she was not to be judged in accordance with our standard of beauty—­though she had many of our little weaknesses.  Her ignorance of civilised ways was pathetic, yet she was vain and coquettish as the fairest of her sex.  And her besetting vanity was endeavouring to be a “lady.”  Work was sordid, for she wore garments which made her the leader of fashion.  She possessed a pair of—­well, a bifurcated garment—­and her whole life was spent in trying to live up to it—­or them.  She succeeded to a certain extent.  Her ways were mincing and precise, and she lazed away her days quite artistically.  A can of water was too heavy for her to carry, less than two hours “spell” at a time quite an offence to her ideal of the amount of repose that a lady wearing the bifurcated garment should permit herself.  She was wont to sit in the shade of the mango-tree and pretend to do a little gardening.  It was all pretence.  What she really loved to do was to wander among the bloodwoods—­with Tom, of course—­with next to nothing on, the next to nothing being the drawers.  There, you have them.  Then you saw her at her best—­or rather worst, for she was a thin sapling of a girl, of a dull coppery colour, and the garment was not always snowy-white.

Hers, after all, was an ideal existence.  She had plenty to eat, as much tobacco as was good for her, and outer raiment that in gaudiness outrivalled the flame-tree and the yellow hibiscus.  She was the favourite of two consorts, and only when her pride and scorpion-like attributes got the better of her was she corrected.

Now, just the other morning, Tom announced that “Little Jinny” was sick “along a bingey” (stomach), and suggested that salt medicine might do her good.  It was quite a common occurrence for her to be sick.  It was such an easy and excellent excuse for a day’s holiday, when she would bask on the soft grey sand and smoke, gazing across the placid bay and waiting for meal-times.  So no one took her sickness seriously.  Subsequent inquiries, however, elicited the fact that “Little Jinny” had eaten little or no tucker the day prior to Tom’s application for medicine on her behalf, and that she was really entitled to sympathy of the most practical kind.  But no one had the least suspicion of the fact.  Dinner-time came and she did not appear, though she was strolling about the flat below the house, apparently only a “little bit sick,” as Tom reported when he came up to his work.