lair in a dense thicket of
thorn-myrtle and wild smilax, a little bower she had made, where was
hidden a horrible-looking image formed of the rough pieces of
saw-palmetto grubbed up by old Bartolo from his garden. She must have
dragged these fragments thither one by one, and with infinite pains
bound them together with her rude withes of strong marsh-grass, until at
last she had formed a rough trunk with crooked arms and a sort of a
head, the red hairy surface of the palmetto looking not unlike the skin
of some beast, and making the creature all the more grotesque. This
fetich was kept crowned with flowers, and after this we often saw the
child stealing away with Drollo to carry to it portions of her meals or
a new-found treasure--a sea-shell, a broken saucer, or a fragment of
ribbon. The food always mysteriously disappeared, and my suspicion is
that Drollo used to go back secretly in the night and devour it, asking
no questions and telling no lies: it fitted in nicely, however, Drollo
merely performing the ancient part of the priests of Jupiter, men who
have been much admired. "What a little pagan she is!" I said.

"Oh no, it is only her doll," replied Christine.

I tried several times to paint Felipa during these first weeks, but
those eyes of hers always evaded me. They were, as I have said before,
yellow--that is, they were brown with yellow lights--and they stared at
you with the most inflexible openness. The child had the full-curved,
half-open mouth of the tropics, and a low Greek forehead. "Why isn't she
pretty?" I said.

"She is hideous," replied Christine: "look at her elbows."

Now, Felipa's arms _were_ unpleasant; they were brown and lean,
scratched and stained, and they terminated in a pair of determined
little paws that could hold on like grim Death. I shall never forget
coming upon a tableau one day out on the barren--a little Florida cow
and Felipa, she holding on by the horns, and the beast with its small
fore feet stubbornly set in the sand; girl pulling one way, cow the
other; both silent and determined. It was a hard contest, but the girl
won.

"And if you pass over her elbows, there are her feet," continued
Christine languidly. For she was a sybaritic lover of the fine linens of
life, that friend of mine--a pre-Raphaelite lady with clinging draperies
and a mediaeval clasp on her belt. Her whole being rebelled against
ugliness, and the mere sight of a sharp-nosed, light-eyed woman on a
cold day