s they closed again, she dropped her hands with a
sigh of disappointment. Yet, before night, the little stranger sat up in
bed, and laughed with pleasure at the treasures of shells and pebbles
which the children spread out on the bed before him.

He was a vigorous, well-made, handsome child, with brilliant eyes and
teeth, but the few words that he spoke were in a language unknown to
most present. Captain Kittridge declared it to be Spanish, and that a
call which he most passionately and often repeated was for his mother.
But he was of that happy age when sorrow can be easily effaced, and the
efforts of the children called forth joyous smiles. When his playthings
did not go to his liking, he showed sparkles of a fiery, irascible
spirit.

The little Mara seemed to appropriate him in feminine fashion, as a
chosen idol and graven image. She gave him at once all her slender stock
of infantine treasures, and seemed to watch with an ecstatic devotion
his every movement,--often repeating, as she looked delightedly around,
"Pitty boy, come."

She had no words to explain the strange dream of the morning; it lay in
her, struggling for expression, and giving her an interest in the
new-comer as in something belonging to herself. Whence it came,--whence
come multitudes like it, which spring up as strange, enchanted flowers,
every now and then in the dull, material pathway of life,--who knows? It
may be that our present faculties have among them a rudimentary one,
like the germs of wings in the chrysalis, by which the spiritual world
becomes sometimes an object of perception; there may be natures in which
the walls of the material are so fine and translucent that the spiritual
is seen through them as through a glass darkly. It may be, too, that the
love which is stronger than death has a power sometimes to make itself
heard and felt through the walls of our mortality, when it would plead
for the defenseless ones it has left behind. All these things _may_
be,--who knows?

* * * * *

"There," said Miss Roxy, coming out of the keeping-room at sunset; "I
wouldn't ask to see a better-lookin' corpse. That ar woman was a sight
to behold this morning. I guess I shook a double handful of stones and
them little shells out of her hair,--now she reely looks beautiful.
Captain Kittridge has made a coffin out o' some cedar-boards he happened
to have, and I lined it with bleached cotton, and stuffed the pillow
ni