o made the place my paradise. She was
a tall, largely made girl, of a dark favour, with eyes of black fire,
and with a warm, Spanish kind of skin, olive-toned with rich reds under,
and the whitest, wonderfullest teeth, and a bush of black hair that was
a marvel. She would let it down often enough, and it hung about her body
till it reached the back of her knees. Lord knows who her mother was. I
never knew, and she said she never knew. Her father brought her home
much as he had brought the parrot home, but I could never think other
than that she was the child of some Spanish woman he had wooed, and, it
is to be hoped, wedded, though I doubt if he were of that temper, on his
travels in the South Americas.

A very curious thing it was to watch that girl go in and out among the
scoundrelly patrons of the Skull and Spectacles, listening to their
devil's chatter in all the lingoes of earth, and yet in a kind of
fashion keeping them at a distance. She would bandy jokes with them of
the coarsest kind, and yet there was not a man of all the following who
would dare to lay a rude hand on her or even to force a kiss from her
against her will. Every man who clinked his can at that hostelry knew
well enough that her father, when he was ashore, or her uncle, when the
other was afloat, would think nothing of knifing any man who insulted
her.

I need hardly say that my association with the Skull and Spectacles
greatly increased in me my longing for the adventurous life. The men who
frequented the inn had one and all the most marvellous tales to tell.
Their tales were not always commendable; they were tales of pirates, of
buccaneers, of fortunes made in evil wise and spent in evil fashion. But
it was not so much the particulars as the generalities of their talk
that delighted me. I loved to hear of islands where the cocoa trees
grew, and where parrots of every hue under heaven squealed and screamed
in the tropic heat; where girls as graceful as goddesses and as yellow
as guineas wore robes of flaming feathers and sang lullabies in soft,
impossible tongues; lands of coral and ivory and all the glories of the
earth, where life was full of golden possibilities and a world away from
the drab respectability of a mercer's life in grey Sendennis.

I grew hungrier and thirstier for travel day after day. I had heard of
seamen in a shipwrecked craft suffering agonies of thirst and being
taunted by the fields of water all about them, to drink of