h stems for Feliu's red-clay pipe,--and where the ruddy sea-beans
were most often tossed upon the shore,--and how the gray pelicans
fished all together, like men--moving in far-extending semicircles,
beating the flood with their wings to drive the fish before them.

And from Carmen she learned the fables and the sayings of the sea,--the
proverbs about its deafness, its avarice, its treachery, its terrific
power,--especially one that haunted her for all time thereafter: Si
quieres aprender a orar, entra en el mar (If thou wouldst learn to
pray, go to the sea). She learned why the sea is salt,--how "the tears
of women made the waves of the sea,"--and how the sea has ii no
friends,--and how the cat's eyes change with the tides.

What had she lost of life by her swift translation from the dusty
existence of cities to the open immensity of nature's freedom? What did
she gain?

Doubtless she was saved from many of those little bitternesses and
restraints and disappointments which all well-bred city children must
suffer in the course of their training for the more or less factitious
life of society:--obligations to remain very still with every nimble
nerve quivering in dumb revolt;--the injustice of being found
troublesome and being sent to bed early for the comfort of her
elders;--the cruel necessity of straining her pretty eyes, for many
long hours at a time, over grimy desks in gloomy school-rooms, though
birds might twitter and bright winds flutter in the trees without;--the
austere constrains and heavy drowsiness of warm churches, filled with
the droning echoes of a voice preaching incomprehensible things;--the
progressively augmenting weariness of lessons in deportment, in
dancing, in music, in the impossible art of keeping her dresses
unruffled and unsoiled. Perhaps she never had any reason to regret all
these.

She went to sleep and awakened with the wild birds;--her life remained
as unfettered by formalities as her fine feet by shoes. Excepting
Carmen's old prayer-book,--in which she learned to read a little,--her
childhood passed without books,--also without pictures, without
dainties, without music, without theatrical amusements. But she saw
and heard and felt much of that which, though old as the heavens and
the earth, is yet eternally new and eternally young with the holiness
of beauty,--eternally mystical and divine,--eternally weird: the
unveiled magnificence of Nature's moods,--the perpetual poem hymne