apparently important personages on the canvas of her life. As it
happened, I never really saw that wife of Miguel, who seemingly had no
name of her own; but I imagined her. She lived on a sandbar in the ocean
not far from the mouth of our river; she drove pelicans like ducks with
a long switch, and she had a tame eagle; she had an old horse also, who
dragged the driftwood across the sand on a sledge, and this old horse
seemed like a giant horse always, outlined as he ever was against the
flat bar and the sky. She went out at dawn, and she went out at sunset,
but during the middle of the burning day she sat at home and polished
sea-beans, for which she obtained untold sums: she was very tall, she
was very yellow, and she had but one eye. These items, one by one, had
been dropped by Felipa at various times, and it was with curiosity that
I gazed upon the original Miguel, the possessor of this remarkable
spouse. He was a grave-eyed, yellow man, who said little and thought
less, applying _cui bono?_ to mental much as the city man applies it to
bodily exertion, and therefore achieving, I think, a finer degree of
inanition. The tame eagle, the pelicans, were nothing to him, and when I
saw his lethargic, gentle countenance my own curiosity about them seemed
to die away in haze, as though I had breathed in an invisible opiate. He
came, he went, and that was all: exit Miguel.

Felipa was constantly with us now. She and Drollo followed the three of
us wherever we went--followed the two also whenever I stayed behind to
sketch, as I often stayed, for in those days I was trying to catch the
secret of the barrens: a hopeless effort, I know it now. "Stay with me,
Felipa," I said; for it was natural to suppose that the lovers might
like to be alone. (I call them lovers for want of a better name, but
they were more like haters: however, in such cases it is nearly the same
thing.) And then Christine, hearing this, would immediately call
"Felipa!" and the child would dart after them, happy as a bird. She wore
her boy's suit now all the time, because the senora had said she "looked
well in it." What the senora really said was, that in boy's clothes she
looked less like a grasshopper. But this had been translated as above by
Edward Bowne when Felipa suddenly descended upon him one day and
demanded to be instantly told what the gracious lady was saying about
her; for she seemed to know by intuition when we spoke of her, although
we talked in