know that. Eduardo--Eduardo--a name of honey."

She flew off singing the name, followed by Drollo carrying his
mistress's palmetto basket in his big patient mouth; but when I passed
the house a few moments afterward she was singing, or rather talking
volubly of, another name--"Miguel," and "the wife of Miguel," who were
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 sand-bar in the
ocean not far from the mouth of our salt-marsh; 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 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 staid behind to
sketch, as I often staid, for in those days I was trying to catch the
secret of the salt-marsh; 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 s