s 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 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.

"