dreams, bending and smiling over her, caressing
her, speaking to her,--sometimes gently chiding, but always chiding
with a kiss. And then the child would laugh in her sleep, and prattle
in Creole,--talking to the luminous shadow, telling the dead mother all
the little deeds and thoughts of the day.... Why would God only let her
come at night?

... Her idea of God had been first defined by the sight of a quaint
French picture of the Creation,--an engraving which represented a
shoreless sea under a black sky, and out of the blackness a solemn and
bearded gray head emerging, and a cloudy hand through which stars
glimmered. God was like old Doctor de Coulanges, who used to visit the
house, and talk in a voice like a low roll of thunder.... At a later
day, when Chita had been told that God was "everywhere at the same time
"--without and within, beneath and above all things,--this idea became
somewhat changed. The awful bearded face, the huge shadowy hand, did
not fade from her thought; but they became fantastically blended with
the larger and vaguer notion of something that filled the world and
reached to the stars,--something diaphanous and incomprehensible like
the invisible air, omnipresent and everlasting like the high blue of
heaven ....

II.

... She began to learn the life of the coast.

With her acquisition of another tongue, there came to her also the
understanding of many things relating to the world of the sea She
memorized with novel delight much that was told her day by day
concerning the nature surrounding her,--many secrets of the air, many
of those signs of heaven which the dwellers in cities cannot comprehend
because the atmosphere is thickened and made stagnant above
them--cannot even watch because the horizon is hidden from their eyes
by walls, and by weary avenues of trees with whitewashed trunks. She
learned, by listening, by asking, by observing also, how to know the
signs that foretell wild weather:--tremendous sunsets, scuddings and
bridgings of cloud,--sharpening and darkening of the sea-line,--and the
shriek of gulls flashing to land in level flight, out of a still
transparent sky,--and halos about the moon.

She learned where the sea-birds, with white bosoms and brown wings,
made their hidden nests of sand,--and where the cranes waded for their
prey,--and where the beautiful wild-ducks, plumaged in satiny lilac and
silken green, found their food,--and where the best reeds grew to
furnis