his friends could not hold out against him more than two
days in the strained relations following upon the _amigo's_ sweeping
him down the back with a toy broom employed by the German-American boy
to scrub the scuppers. This was not so much an injury as an indignity,
but it was resented as an indignity, in spite of many demure glances
of propitiation from the _amigo's_ ironical eyes and murmurs of
inarticulate apology as he passed.

He was, up to a certain point, the kindest and truest of _amigos_;
then his weird seizure came, and the baby was spilled out of the
carriage he had been so benevolently pushing up and down; or the
second officer's legs, as he walked past with the prettiest girl on
board, were hit with the stick that the _amigo_ had been innocently
playing shuffle-board with; or some passenger was taken unawares in
his vanity or infirmity and made to contribute to the _amigo's_
passion for active amusement.

At this point I ought to explain that the _amigo_ was not traveling
alone from Ecuador to Paris, where it was said he was to rejoin his
father. At meal-times, and at other rare intervals, he was seen to be
in the charge of a very dark and very silent little man, with
intensely black eyes and mustache, clad in raven hues from his head to
the delicate feet on which he wore patent-leather shoes. With him the
_amigo_ walked gravely up and down the deck, and behaved decorously at
table; and we could not reconcile the apparent affection between the
two with a theory we had that the _amigo_ had been found impossible in
his own country, and had been sent out of Ecuador by a decree of the
government, or perhaps a vote of the whole people. The little, dark,
silent man, in his patent-leather boots, had not the air of conveying
a state prisoner into exile, and we wondered in vain what the tie
between him and the _amigo_ was. He might have been his tutor, or his
uncle. He exercised a quite mystical control over the _amigo_, who was
exactly obedient to him in everything, and would not look aside at you
when in his keeping. We reflected with awe and pathos that, as they
roomed together, it was his privilege to see the _amigo_ asleep, when
that little, very kissable black head rested innocently on the pillow,
and the busy brain within it was at peace with the world which formed
its pleasure and its prey in waking.

It would be idle to represent that the _amigo_ played his pranks upon
that shipload of long-suffering pe