the trammels of earthly caution; for it is only women who manage to put at times into their love an element just palpable enough to give one a fright—­an extra-terrestrial touch.  I ask myself with wonder—­how the world can look to them—­whether it has the shape and substance we know, the air we breathe!  Sometimes I fancy it must be a region of unreasonable sublimities seething with the excitement of their adventurous souls, lighted by the glory of all possible risks and renunciations.  However, I suspect there are very few women in the world, though of course I am aware of the multitudes of mankind and of the equality of sexes—­in point of numbers, that is.  But I am sure that the mother was as much of a woman as the daughter seemed to be.  I cannot help picturing to myself these two, at first the young woman and the child, then the old woman and the young girl, the awful sameness and the swift passage of time, the barrier of forest, the solitude and the turmoil round these two lonely lives, and every word spoken between them penetrated with sad meaning.  There must have been confidences, not so much of fact, I suppose, as of innermost feelings—­regrets—­fears—­warnings, no doubt:  warnings that the younger did not fully understand till the elder was dead—­and Jim came along.  Then I am sure she understood much—­not everything—­the fear mostly, it seems.  Jim called her by a word that means precious, in the sense of a precious gem—­jewel.  Pretty, isn’t it?  But he was capable of anything.  He was equal to his fortune, as he—­after all—­must have been equal to his misfortune.  Jewel he called her; and he would say this as he might have said “Jane,” don’t you know—­with a marital, homelike, peaceful effect.  I heard the name for the first time ten minutes after I had landed in his courtyard, when, after nearly shaking my arm off, he darted up the steps and began to make a joyous, boyish disturbance at the door under the heavy eaves.  “Jewel!  O Jewel!  Quick!  Here’s a friend come,” . . . and suddenly peering at me in the dim verandah, he mumbled earnestly, “You know—­this—­no confounded nonsense about it—­can’t tell you how much I owe to her—­and so—­you understand—­I—­exactly as if . . .”  His hurried, anxious whispers were cut short by the flitting of a white form within the house, a faint exclamation, and a child-like but energetic little face with delicate features and a profound, attentive glance peeped out of the inner gloom, like a bird out of the recess of a nest.  I was struck by the name, of course; but it was not till later on that I connected it with an astonishing rumour that had met me on my journey, at a little place on the coast about 230 miles south of Patusan River.  Stein’s schooner, in which I had my passage, put in there, to collect some produce, and, going ashore, I found to my great surprise that the wretched locality could boast of a third-class deputy-assistant resident, a big, fat, greasy, blinking fellow of mixed