m had
caught the following line of a song, "O, carry me back to old
Martinez," with which he continued to stun our ears all the time we
remained, repeating it over and over with as much pride and joy as a
mocking-bird exhibits when he has learned a new sound.

On this occasion I was more than ever struck with what I have often
remarked before,--the extreme beauty of the _limbs_ of the Indian
women of California. Though for haggardness of expression and ugliness
of feature they might have been taken for a band of Macbethian witches,
a bronze statue of Cleopatra herself never folded more beautifully
rounded arms above its dusky bosom, or poised upon its pedestal a
slenderer ankle or a more statuesque foot, than those which gleamed
from beneath the dirty blankets of these wretched creatures. There was
one exception, however, to the general hideousness of their faces. A
girl of sixteen, perhaps, with those large, magnificently lustrous, yet
at the same time soft, eyes, so common in novels, so rare in real life,
had shyly glided like a dark, beautiful spirit into the corner of the
room. A fringe of silken jet swept heavily upward from her dusky cheek,
athwart which the richest color came and went like flashes of
lightning. Her flexible lips curved slightly away from teeth like
strips of cocoanut meat, with a mocking grace infinitely bewitching.
She wore a cotton chemise,--disgustingly dirty, I must confess,--girt
about her slender waist with a crimson handkerchief, while over her
night-black hair, carelessly knotted beneath the rounded chin, was a
purple scarf of knotted silk. Her whole appearance was picturesque in
the extreme. She sat upon the ground with her pretty brown fingers
languidly interlaced above her knee, "round as a _period_," (as a
certain American poet has so funnily said of a similar limb in his
Diana,) and smiled up into my face as if we were the dearest friends.

I was perfectly enraptured with this wildwood Cleopatra, and bored F.
almost beyond endurance with exclamations about her starry eyes, her
chiseled limbs, and her beautiful nut-brown cheeks.

I happened to take out of my pocket a paper of pins, when all the women
begged for some of them. This lovely child still remained silent in the
posture of exquisite grace which she had so unconsciously assumed, but,
nevertheless, she looked as pleased as any of them when I gave her,
also, a row of the much-coveted treasures. But I found I had got myself
in