her side are
ships of all nations, come on peaceful trading errands or for pleasure
cruises, including a dainty little white French yacht that looks like a
butterfly which has just alighted.

We go ashore in a launch and are met on the quay by a medley of strange
folk and a great clamour of voices! The men and women are nearly all
dark skinned and black eyed, and yet they are all speaking English after
a fashion. A woman offers us a curiously twisted openwork basket of
oranges, with the deep-coloured fruit gleaming through the meshes, a man
implores us to take some of the absurdly neat little nosegays he has
made up, picture postcards are thrust under our noses, and cabmen wildly
beseech us to patronise their open vehicles. It is a brilliant scene,
full of life and colour and warmth, and the people all seem
good-humoured and jolly.

Sitting huddled up against a wall, with some odd-looking bundles beside
them, are a group of very poor people; they are emigrants about to leave
their own country for South America. Out there in the bay is the
emigrant ship, and dipping toward her over the open water are several
boats loaded down to the gunwale going out; others have reached her side
and the people swarm up like flies. This group on the quay are awaiting
their turn. A small boy and girl are rolling about in the sun like
little lizards and laughing gaily. The little girl is called Maria and
is about ten years old; she has a tiny scarlet shawl pinned across her
chest, and her bright black hair shines in the sunlight; in her wee
brown ears are little gilt ear-rings, and she is hugging tightly to her
bosom a large and very gaudy doll. It is not exactly the kind of doll an
English child would care about, because its face is the face of an idiot
and it is made of some sort of poor composition stuff; its clothes are
tawdry material of tinsel and stiff muslin, and are pinned on by pins
with coloured glass heads glittering in the sun. Maria thinks it lovely
and shrieks if her young brother Sebastian lays a finger on it. She is
on the point of leaving her own country, perhaps for ever, to travel for
thousands of miles to a land where everything is different from what she
is used to; but she is as unconscious of this as if she were a little
kitten, and as long as she can roll in the sunshine and hug her doll,
the first she has ever possessed, the thought of the morrow does not
trouble her soul.

Her home lies far away in the interio