lthough we were slow to comprehend the
patois of the old people, which seemed to borrow as much from the
Italian tongue and the Greek as from its mother Spanish. "I know a great
deal," Felipa remarked confidently, "for my father taught me. He had
sailed on the ocean out of sight of land, and he knew many things. These
he taught to me. Do the gracious ladies think there is anything else to
know?"

One of the gracious ladies thought not, decidedly: in answer to my
remonstrance, expressed in English, she said, "Teach a child like that,
and you ruin her."

"Ruin her?"

"Ruin her happiness--the same thing."

Felipa had a dog, a second self--a great gaunt yellow creature of
unknown breed, with crooked legs, big feet and the name Drollo. What
Drollo meant, or whether it was an abbreviation, we never knew, but
there was a certain satisfaction in it, for the dog was droll: the fact
that the Minorcan title, whatever it was, meant nothing of that kind,
made it all the better. We never saw Felipa without Drollo. "They look
a good deal alike," observed Christine--"the same coloring."

"For shame!" I said.

But it was true. The child's bronzed yellow skin and soft eyes were not
unlike the dog's, but her head was crowned with a mass of short black
curls, while Drollo had only his two great flapping ears and his low
smooth head. Give him an inch or two more of skull, and what a creature
a dog would be! For love and faithfulness even now what man can match
him? But, although ugly, Felipa was a picturesque little object always,
whether attired in boy's clothes or in her own forlorn bodice and skirt.
Olive-hued and meagre-faced, lithe and thin, she flew over the pine
barrens like a creature of air, laughing to feel her short curls toss
and her thin childish arms buoyed up on the breeze as she ran, with
Drollo barking behind. For she loved the winds, and always knew when
they were coming--whether down from the north, in from the ocean, or
across from the Gulf of Mexico: she watched for them, sitting in the
doorway, where she could feel their first breath, and she taught us the
signal of the clouds. She was a queer little thing: we used to find her
sometimes dancing alone out on the barren in a circle she had marked out
with pine-cones, and once she confided to us that she talked to the
trees. "They hear," she said in a whisper: "you should see how knowing
they look, and how their leaves listen."

Once we came upon her most secret