e who
sells for cash, with the customary legend: "If you want credit, come
back to-morrow!"

Tona could be quite properly satisfied at the relative comfort in which
her young ones were growing up. Business was getting better and better,
and an old stocking which she kept hidden between the foot board of her
bunk and the big mattress there, was gradually filling with the silver
_douros_ she had saved.

Sometimes she could contain her happiness no longer; and to view her
good fortune in perspective, as it were, she would walk down to the
fringe of the surf, and look back with welling eyes at the hen coop, the
open-air kitchen, the sonorous pig-pen, and finally the boat itself, its
bow and stern projecting from a maze of fences, cane-work and thatch,
and painted a clean dazzling white like some bark of dream-land tossed
by a hurricane into a barnyard.

Not that life did not still have its hardships for her. She got little
sleep. To begin with, she had to be up at sunrise every morning, and
oftentimes, after midnight, when boats would make shore late or be
leaving before dawn, the fishermen would start banging on her door and
she would have to get up and serve them. These early morning sprees were
the ones that made most money, though they caused her most uneasiness on
the whole. She knew whom she was dealing with. Ashore for a few hours
after a week at sea, those men wanted all the pleasures of land crowded
into minutes of pure joy. They lighted on wine like flies on honey. If
the older men soon fell asleep with their pipes dead between their
teeth, not so the sturdier boys, aflame from the privations and
abstinence of life at sea. They would look at _sina_ Tona in ways that
would bring gestures of annoyance from her and make her wonder how she
could fight off the brutal caresses of those Tritons in striped shirts.

She had never been a beauty; but her trace of fleshiness, her big black
eyes that seemed to brighten a clean brownish countenance, and
especially the light wrapper she would hurriedly throw on to attend to
her nocturnal patronage, lent her charm in the eyes of those healthy
youths who laid their courses toward the Valencian shore with joyous
anticipation of a sight of _sina_ Tona.

But Tona was a woman of brain and brawn, and she knew how to handle
those fellows. She bestowed no favors. When their words were over-bold
she would answer with disdain. To nudges she replied with cuffs, and
once when a sailor