e town, and
thought she could find her way to some new place if she studied it
well.

Then Mrs. Bunker showed her a big map of the whole country, and there
Lucy found the river, and the roads, and the names of the villages
near, as she had seen or heard of them; and she began to understand
that a map or globe really brought distant places into an exceedingly
small picture, and that where she saw a name and a spot she was to
think of houses and churches; that a branching black line was a
flowing river full of water; a curve in, a pretty bay shut in with
rocks and hills; a point jutting out, generally a steep rock with a
lighthouse on it.

"And all these places are countries, Bunchey, are they, with fields
and houses like ours?"

"Houses, yes, and fields, but not always like ours, Miss Lucy."

"And are there little children, boys and girls, in them all?"

"To be sure there are, else how would the world go on? Why, I've
seen them by swarms, white or brown or black, running down to the
shore as soon as the vessel cast anchor; and whatever color they
were, you might be sure of two things, Miss Lucy, in which they
were all alike."

"Oh, what, Mrs. Bunker?"

"Why, in making plenty of noise, and in wanting all they could get
to eat. But they were little darlings, some of them, if I only
could have got at them to make them a bit cleaner. Some of them
looked for all the world like the little bronze images your Uncle
has got in the museum, which he brought from Italy, and they hadn't
a rag more clothing on either. They were in India. Dear, dear, to
see them tumble about in the surf!"

"Oh, what fun! what fun! I wish I could see them."

"You would be right glad, Missie, I can tell you, if you had been
three or four months aboard a vessel with nothing but dry biscuits
and salt junk, and may be a tin of preserved vegetables just to keep
it wholesome, to see the black fellows come grinning alongside with
their boats and canoes all full of oranges and limes and grape-fruit
and cocoanuts. Doesn't one's mouth fairly water for them?"

"Do please sit down, there's a good Mother Bunch, and tell me all
about them. Come, please do."

"Suppose I did, Miss Lucy, where would your poor uncle's preserved
ginger be, that no one knows from real West Indian ginger?"

"Oh, let me come into your room, and you can tell me all the time
you are doing the ginger.

"It is very hot there, Missie."

"That will be more like some of