ome moments, she wrote and read out to me words
literally translated as follows:--

"The rich aviary my flower-bird thought over full. I would breathe
home [air]. Health-speak." The sense of which, as I could already
understand, was--

"A splendid mansion has been given us, but my flower-bird has found it
too full. I wish for my native air. Prescribe."

The brevity of the message was very characteristic of the language.
Equally characteristic of the stylography was the fact that the words
occupied about an inch beyond the address. Following her pencil as she
pointed to the ciphers, I said--

"Is not _asny care_ a false concord? And why have you used the past
tense?"

This ill-timed pedantry, applying to Martial grammar the rules of that
with which my boyhood had been painfully familiarised, provoked, amid
all our trouble, Eveena's low silver-toned laugh.

"I meant it," she answered. "My father will look at his pupil's
writing with both eyes."

"Well, you are out of reach even of the leveloo."

She laughed again.

"Asnyca-re," she said; the changed accentuation turning the former
words into the well-remembered name of my landing-place, with the
interrogative syllable annexed.

This message despatched, we could only await the reply. Nestling among
the cushions at my knee, her head resting on my breast, Eveena said--

"And now, forgive my presumption in counselling you, and my reminding
you of what is painful to both. But what to us is as the course of the
clock, is strange as the stars to you. You must see--_them_, and must
order all household arrangements; and" (glancing at a dial fixed in
the wall) "the black is driving down the green."

"So much the better," I said. "I shall have less time to speak to
them, and less chance of speaking or looking my mind. And as to
arrangements, those, of course, you must make."

"I! forgive me," she answered, "that is impossible. It is for you to
assign to each of us her part in the household, her chamber, her rank
and duties. You forget that I hold exactly the same position with the
youngest among them, and cannot presume even to suggest, much less to
direct."

I was silent, and after a pause she went on--

"It is not for me to advise you; but"--

"Speak your thought, now and always, Eveena. Even if I did not stand
in so much need of your guidance in a new world, I never yet refused
to hear counsel; and it is a wife's right to offer it."

"Is it? We are not so t