easy.

"Why, I'm learning more from Raphael Ristofalo than I ever learned from
my school-masters: I'm learning the art of livelihood."

He ran on from Ristofalo to the men among whom he had been mingling all
day. He mimicked the strange, long swing of their Sicilian speech; told
of their swarthy faces and black beards, their rich instinct for color
in costume; their fierce conversation and violent gestures; the energy
of their movements when they worked, and the profoundness of their
repose when they rested; the picturesqueness and grotesqueness of the
negroes, too; the huge, flat, round baskets of fruit which the black men
carried on their heads, and which the Sicilians bore on their shoulders
or the nape of the neck. The "captain" of the schooner was a central
figure.

"Doctor," asked Richling, suddenly, "do you know anything about the
island of Cozumel?"

"Aha!" thought Mary. So there was something besides the day's earning
that elated him.

She had suspected it. She looked at her husband with an expression of
the most alert pleasure. The Doctor noticed it.

"No," he said, in reply to Richling's question.

"It stands out in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Yucatan," began
Richling.

"Yes, I know that."

"Well, Mary, I've almost promised the schooner captain that we'll go
there. He wants to get up a colony."

Mary started.

"Why, John!" She betrayed a look of dismay, glanced at their visitor,
tried to say "Have you?" approvingly, and blushed.

The Doctor made no kind of response.

"Now, don't conclude," said John to Mary, coloring too, but smiling. He
turned to the physician. "It's a wonderful spot, Doctor."

But the Doctor was still silent, and Richling turned.

"Just to think, Mary, of a place where you can raise all the products of
two zones; where health is almost perfect; where the yellow fever has
never been; and where there is such beauty as can be only in the tropics
and a tropical sea. Why, Doctor, I can't understand why Europeans or
Americans haven't settled it long ago."

"I suppose we can find out before we go, can't we?" said Mary, looking
timorously back and forth between John and the Doctor.

"The reason is," replied John, "it's so little known. Just one island
away out by itself. Three crops of fruit a year. One acre planted in
bananas feeds fifty men. All the capital a man need have is an axe to
cut down the finest cabinet and dye-woods in the world. The thermometer
never go