s the day's work
brought with it could I thereby have escaped the suffering and
bitterness it often entailed. Barren though my life may appear from your
point of view, I know it to be infinitely rich in comparison to yours,
for, as I have said, you have never known what life really means--never
experienced its hardships, never beheld the bright face of danger, nor
tasted the joys of the great free life in the open, the simple daily
life devoid of the cares of civilized men, without which the life of a
man can never be complete, be he what he may.

"'Where the foot rests, that is home,' is a saying among my people; a
truth, that so far as my experience goes, has never been gainsaid."

In spite of themselves and the fact that they could not wholly
comprehend the weight and significance of her words, they were
fascinated by her discourse, emphasized and illustrated as it was by the
dramatic intensity of her gestures and expression.

"Senorita," said Blanch at last, breaking the silence that ensued, "I
believe you are still at heart the savage, or better, the nomad you were
when you lived in the wilderness."

"When I lived in the Garden of Eden, in God's world, not man's, is what
you mean," she replied.

"Do you never have a desire to return to it?" asked Bessie.

"The old days can never be effaced," answered Chiquita. "My thoughts
continually revert to them when, as a little girl, I used to set meat
and drink before my father and his guests as they sat in a circle about
the fire in the center of his lodge or in our house and smoked the long
red clay pipes, or, after the crops were harvested, roamed through the
land during the hunting season; sometimes afoot, at other times in
canoes or on horseback. There are times when such an insatiable longing
for the old life seizes me that I become almost unmanageable. I long to
throw myself down in the open--lie close in the embrace of Mother Earth,
and breathe the smoke of the camp-fire. My unrest is like that of the
birds when the spell of the spring and the autumn comes upon them and
the migratory instinct seizes them, or like that of the great herds of
reindeer in the North which travel each year to the sea to drink of its
salty waters, and which, if prevented, die."

"Do you know," said Bessie to Blanch a little later, when they were
alone in their room, "she's fascinating when she talks like that."

"Ah! that's just where the danger lies," answered Blanch. "Think of wha