ip's flare and as
far. Never have I seen such a thing, I say, and never shall. There were
the three of them, like young deer on a bleak hillside, singing and
laughing and leaping down, and, what's more, speaking to each other in
an odd lingo, with here a word of French and there a word of German,
and after that something that was beyond me and foreign to my
understanding.

"God be good to me--saw man ever such a sight? And the dress of 'em,
the dress of 'em," whispers Peter Bligh. But I clapped my hand upon his
mouth and stopped him that time.

"The dress is all right," said I; "what I'm wondering is how three of
that sort came in such a place as this. And well born too, well born,
or I don't know the meaning of the term!"

They were pretty creatures and their dress was like the rest of them.
Short skirts all looped and filled with flowers, toggery above cut out
of some white skin, with caps to match and their hair falling in big
ramping curls about it--they were for all the world like the dancers
you see at a stage play and just as active. And to hear their voices,
sweet and musical, floating from ravine to ravine like a choir singing
in a place of echoes, aye that was something you might not soon forget.
But what they were doing in such a place, or how they came there, the
Lord above alone knew, and not a plain seaman like Jasper Begg.

[Illustration: Like dancers at a stage play.]

"What are they saying, Peter--what do you make of it?" I asked him,
under my breath.

"'Tis the French lingo," says he, foolish-like, "and if it's not that,
'tis the German--leastwise no Christian man that I know of could
distinguish between 'em."

"Peter," says I, "that's what you learn in the asylum. 'Tis no more the
French lingo than your own. Why, hearken to it."

Well, he listened, and soon we heard a pretty echo from the valley, for
they'd gone down towards the gardens now; and one word repeated often
had as nice a touch of music as I remember hearing. It was just this:
"Rosamunda--munda--munda," and you can't think how fresh the young
voice sounded in that lonely place, or what a chill it gave a man when
he remembered the devils over at the reef and what they'd done to the
crew of the Santa Cruz. I do believe to this day that our fellows
imagined they'd seen nothing more nor less than an apparition out of
the black rocks above them; and it wasn't until I'd spoken to them in
good honest English that I got them to go on