-she stretched out her arm
carelessly and patted Felipa's curly head. The child caught the
descending hand and kissed the long white fingers.

It was a wild place where we were, yet not new or crude--the coast of
Florida, that old-new land, with its deserted plantations, its skies of
Paradise, and its broad wastes open to the changeless sunshine. The old
house stood on the edge of the dry land, where the pine barren ended and
the salt marsh began: in front curved the tide-water river that seemed
ever trying to come up close to the barren and make its acquaintance,
but could not quite succeed, since it must always turn and flee at a
fixed hour, like Cinderella at the ball, leaving not a silver slipper,
but purple driftwood and bright sea-weeds, brought in from the Gulf
Stream outside. A planked platform ran out into the marsh from the edge
of the barren, and at its end the boats were moored; for although at
high tide the river was at our feet, at low tide it was far away out in
the green waste somewhere, and if we wanted it we must go and seek it.
We did not want it, however: we let it glide up to us twice a day with
its fresh salt odors and flotsam of the ocean, and the rest of the time
we wandered over the barrens or lay under the trees looking up into the
wonderful blue above, listening to the winds as they rushed across from
sea to sea. I was an artist, poor and painstaking: Christine was my kind
friend. She had brought me South because my cough was troublesome, and
here because Edward Bowne recommended the place. He and three
fellow-sportsmen were down at the Madre Lagoon, farther south; I thought
it probable we should see him, without his three fellow-sportsmen,
before very long.

"Who were the three women you have seen, Felipa?" said Christine.

"The grandmother, an Indian woman of the Seminoles who comes sometimes
with baskets, and the wife of Miguel of the island. But they are all
old, and their skins are curled: I like better the silver skin of the
senora."

Poor little Felipa lived on the edge of the great salt marsh alone with
her grand-parents, for her mother was dead. The yellow old couple were
slow-witted Minorcans, part pagan, part Catholic, and wholly ignorant:
their minds rarely rose above the level of their orange trees and their
fish-nets. Felipa's father was a Spanish sailor, and as he had died only
the year before, the child's Spanish was fairly correct, and we could
converse with her readily, a