alike in."

"Oh, what, Mrs. Bunker?"

"Why, in plenty of noise for one, and the other for wanting all they
could get to eat. But they were little darlings, some of them, if I only
could have got at them to make them a bit nicer. Some of them looked for
all the world like the little bronze images Master has got in the
museum, brought from Italy, and hadn't a rag more clothing neither. They
were in India. Dear, dear, to see them tumble about in the surf!"

"O, what fun! what fun! I wish I could see them. Suppose I could."

"You would be right glad, Missie, I can tell you, if you had been three
or four months aboard with nothing but dry biscuits and salt junk, and
may be a tin of preserved vegetables just to keep it wholesome, to see
the black fellows come grinning alongside with their boats and canoes
all full of oranges and limes and shaddocks and cocoa-nuts. Doesn't
one's mouth fairly water for them?"

"Do please sit down, there's a good Mother Bunch, and tell me all about
them? Come, suppose you do."

"Suppose I did, Miss Lucy, and where would your poor uncle's preserved
ginger be, that no one knows from real West Indian?"

[Illustration: "Do please sit down, there's a good Mother Bunch, and
tell me all about them."

_Page 18._]

"Oh, let me come into your room, and you can tell me all the time you
are doing the ginger."

"It is very hot there, Missie."

"That will be more like some of the places. I'll suppose I'm there!
Look, Mrs. Bunker, here's a whole green sea, all over the tiniest little
dots. There can't be people in them."

"Dots? You'd hardly see all over one of those dots if you were in one.
That's the South Sea Miss Lucy, and those are the loveliest isles,
except, may be, the West Indies, that ever I saw."

"Tell me about them, please," entreated Lucy "Here's one; its name
is--is Ysabel--such a little wee one."

[Illustration: Lucy had a great sneezing fit, and when she looked again
into the smoke, what did she see but two little black figures.

_Page 22._]

"I can't tell you much of those South Sea Isles, Missie, being that I
only made one voyage among them, when Bunker chartered the _Penguin_ for
the sandal-wood trade; and we did not touch at many, being that the
natives were fierce and savage, and made nothing of coming down with
arrows and spears at a boat's crew. So we only went to such islands as
the missionaries had been at, and got the people to be more civil and
conformable."