ighted Encantadas. All along beneath the eaves, a
spotted sheet, quite weather-stained, was spread, pinned to short,
upright stakes, set in the shallow sand. A small clinker, thrown into
the cloth, weighed its middle down, thereby straining all moisture into
a calabash placed below. This vessel supplied each drop of water ever
drunk upon the isle by the Cholos. Hunilla told us the calabash, would
sometimes, but not often, be half filled overnight. It held six quarts,
perhaps. "But," said she, "we were used to thirst. At sandy Payta, where
I live, no shower from heaven ever fell; all the water there is brought
on mules from the inland vales."

Tied among the thickets were some twenty moaning tortoises, supplying
Hunilla's lonely larder; while hundreds of vast tableted black bucklers,
like displaced, shattered tomb-stones of dark slate, were also scattered
round. These were the skeleton backs of those great tortoises from
which Felipe and Truxill had made their precious oil. Several large
calabashes and two goodly kegs were filled with it. In a pot near by
were the caked crusts of a quantity which had been permitted to
evaporate. "They meant to have strained it off next day," said Hunilla,
as she turned aside.

I forgot to mention the most singular sight of all, though the first
that greeted us after landing.

Some ten small, soft-haired, ringleted dogs, of a beautiful breed,
peculiar to Peru, set up a concert of glad welcomings when we gained the
beach, which was responded to by Hunilla. Some of these dogs had, since
her widowhood, been born upon the isle, the progeny of the two brought
from Payta. Owing to the jagged steeps and pitfalls, tortuous thickets,
sunken clefts and perilous intricacies of all sorts in the interior,
Hunilla, admonished by the loss of one favorite among them, never
allowed these delicate creatures to follow her in her occasional
birds'-nests climbs and other wanderings; so that, through long
habituation, they offered not to follow, when that morning she crossed
the land, and her own soul was then too full of other things to heed
their lingering behind. Yet, all along she had so clung to them, that,
besides what moisture they lapped up at early daybreak from the small
scoop-holes among the adjacent rocks, she had shared the dew of her
calabash among them; never laying by any considerable store against
those prolonged and utter droughts which, in some disastrous seasons,
warp these isles.

Hav