Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

That evening we reached Gap, the capital of the department of the High Alps, and once an important Protestant centre. Farel, the French Reformer of the sixteenth century, was born and for a time preached here. But since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes until very lately--during a period, that is, of nearly two hundred years--no Protestant pastor has been tolerated in the town, and the once numerous flock was long since dispersed. A Swiss society undertook two or three years ago a Protestant mission at Gap, and a friend in Geneva had given us the name of the present evangelist. A humbler or more thankless charge could scarcely be imagined than such a work in such a place. There is no nucleus of hereditary Protestants, as in the mountain-parishes of the department, and at the same time the little city is so isolated that its people have retained the superstitions and religious animosities of the Dark Ages. It was therefore with much compassionate thought of his pitiful case that we sought the evangelist's house. He was not, however, a man toward whom one could maintain for a moment that frame of mind. Brisk, cheerful, polished in manner and with an unsought elegance of dress and carriage, he had not in the least the air of a despised heretic struggling hopelessly against social as well as ecclesiastical contempt. Six avowed converts were the definite results of his work for more than two years. During much of that time he had been hampered by insuperable difficulties in finding a place for his service or even a lodging for his family. The latter was at last provided, as a daring defiance of popular prejudice, by a landlord who prided himself upon being a _libre penseur_. For his chapel he secured a disused shop in the front of a bath-house. The proprietress of the establishment was punished by the priests for her unrighteous thrift by being refused the sacrament. Her business, too, was for a while endangered. One instance out of many of the kind of prejudice she provoked was that of two wealthy and educated ladies, who, as they entered the bath one day, heard music in the _chapelle évangélique_ and instantly beat a hurried retreat. They only stopped to explain that all the world knows the object of Protestant worship is the devil, and they dare not stay within hearing of the sacrilegious rites. In spite of multiform discouragements like these, the evangelist and his wife, a motherly woman of much quiet strength, whose gentleness made sweet a very homely face, talked of their work and prospects with a matter-of-course hopefulness which it was not easy to share. Nothing in their habits, they told us, had more amazed their Roman Catholic neighbors at first than their lavish use of water. But in that particular, at least, suspicion had been allayed, their perseverance had proved the practice harmless, and their example was beginning to find a few timid imitators.

Our first night after leaving Gap was spent at Embrun. As we approached the town, which surmounts an extraordinary platform of rock, its walls looking like part of the smooth, brown tufa precipice that rises abruptly out of the valley, we seemed to see in its picturesque and impressive aspect something of the grandeur and gloom of its long history. The cathedral where so many archbishops have ministered preserves little trace of its former splendors: even architecturally it is without attraction.

For the next two days our route continued to lie through the valley, which we entered upon leaving Gap, of the Durance. It is an apparently insignificant but treacherous stream, which by repeated floods has spread ugly devastation over a hill-girdled country that ought to be smiling with peace and plenty. At Guillestre we came in sight of the jagged double peak of Mont Pelvoux, and got a magnificent vista toward the south, ending in the white slopes of some giant of the Cottian Alps. The Mont Pelvoux and the Pointe des Écrins, the greatest of those mountains from which the department takes its name, although they appear on none of the ordinary maps, stand, I believe, only twelfth and thirteenth in the scale of height among the mountains of Europe. The explorations of Whymper have introduced them to his readers, but they still remain almost untrodden by other climbers.

On the second afternoon we reached the lateral valley of Fressinière, the climax of our journey. There was refreshment for soul as well as body in the daintily-clean, bare-floored rooms, redolent of apples set out to dry, into which we were welcomed by Pastor Charpiot and his wife at Pallons. The village is a mere group of Alpine huts, and the only chance of shelter was at the presbytery. So much we had little doubt of finding there, but we counted as little upon the warm and graceful hospitality which greeted our application. And when our nationality transpired it added new zest to the good-will of our host and hostess. We were their first Transatlantic guests.

The valley of Fressinière, at the entrance of which Pallons lies, is the centre of those special interests which first prompted the pilgrimage I am recording. With it are specially associated the earliest traditions of Protestantism in France, and here Felix Neff spent the larger part of his brief but memorable career as pastor in the High Alps. I suppose the exact antiquity of the Protestants of Dauphiné is one of the historical problems that still await their final solution. The older chronicles provide them with what seems an unbroken line of descent from the second century, when Irenæus preached in Lyons and Vienne. Christian fugitives from those cities during the persecution of Marcus Aurelius may, it is alleged, have taken refuge in the not distant Dauphiné mountains, and have transmitted to their descendants the primitive faith they had received. But modern criticism has so seriously undermined, as practically to have demolished, this imposing genealogical structure. It is not denied that voices of more or less emphatic protest against Rome made themselves heard among these mountains and the neighboring Cottian Alps during the earlier centuries. Can such voices be held to represent any definitely-organized dissentient body of more remote origin than the Poor Men of Lyons, led by Peter Waldo in 1172? The latest researches give an apparently final negative answer to this question. At least, however, it is beyond dispute that long before the Reformation the valleys of the High Alps were a retreat for persecuted schismatics whose opposition to the Romish Church anticipated Protestantism. As early as the fifteenth century a papal bull denounced as _inveterate_ the heretics of Dauphiné and Provence, and about the middle of the next century delegates from those provinces appeared at the first national Protestant synod in France with the following declaration: "We consent to merge in the common cause, but we require no Reformation, for our forefathers and ourselves have ever disclaimed the corruptions of the churches in communion with Rome." Enough is therefore certain as to the antecedents of these Protestant mountaineers to surround them with an entirely peculiar interest. The saddest feature, perhaps, of all their history is the stunting of mind and character that has resulted from centuries of oppression. After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes they were subject to fresh persecution, and until within the present century they have been denied the privileges of citizenship and forced to look upon themselves as outcasts. One can only wonder at the degree of individuality and force which they have still preserved.

Felix Neff, while still a _proposant_, or candidate for the ministry, at Geneva, was sent to Dauphiné in response to the appeal of two pastors there for an assistant. Two years later, at the beginning of 1824, in the twenty-sixth year of his age, he became pastor of the Protestant churches in the Arvieux section of the High Alps. This was the larger and by far the more arduous of the two parishes into which the department was at that time divided. In seventeen or eighteen widely-scattered villages Neff found the little groups of "Huguenots" which composed his charge. His official residence, the presbytery, was at La Chalp, a hamlet above the village of Arvieux and near the border of Italy. From this point to St. Laurent, the western limit of his parish, is a journey of sixty miles, including the passage of a dangerous gorge and the crossing of a difficult snow-pass. St. Véran on the east was the least remote of his boundaries, but even this is separated from La Chalp by twelve miles of steep descent and rough climbing. On the north and the south the extreme points were distant respectively thirty-three and twenty-miles, and the routes are of the same character as in the other directions.

These disadvantages, instead of daunting the young pastor, seemed only to stimulate his ardor. "I am always dreaming of the High Alps," he had written in 1823, after visiting them for the first time. "I had rather be stationed there than in places which are under the beautiful sky of Languedoc. The country bears a strong resemblance to the Alps of Switzerland. It has their advantages, and even their beauties. It has, above all, an energetic race of people--intelligent, active, hardy and patient under fatigue--who offer a better soil for the gospel than the wealthy and corrupt inhabitants of the plains of the South." The illusions that mingled with these early impressions were doubtless soon dispelled. He shows later a perfectly clear perception of the degenerate condition of his parishioners, but his eagerness to serve them waxes with his sense of their need. Neff was in modern times their first regularly-appointed pastor. A son of Oberlin, whose short but devoted life shows him to have inherited his father's spirit, had once undertaken the provisional charge of the parish, but only for a few months. In general, it had had no ministry beyond occasional visits from the pastor of Orpierre, the other section of the department.

The valley of Fressinière at once attracted Neff's peculiar regard. It was the part of his parish most difficult of access and most cut off from any chance of material prosperity. The climate is such that in unfavorable seasons even rye will not ripen, and the patches of potatoes straggling forlornly among the rocks often fail to reach maturity. No other grain or vegetable can be raised. Mould quickly attacks the flour in this mountain-air, and the year's baking is accordingly done in the autumn as soon as the rye comes back from the mill. The coarse black loaves grow perfectly hard in a few weeks, and have to be chopped into pieces and soaked in hot water before they can be eaten. It is only at the head of the valley, above the hamlet of Dourmillouse, that any pastures are found, and many of those are inaccessible to cattle and scarcely safe for sheep. They are besides so meagre that in dry summers no hay can be made, and the peasants are forced to sell their beasts at a loss or else see them die for want of food. The addition of a little salted meat to the half-grown potatoes and the stony bread is a luxury of only the most prosperous years. The bald mountain-slopes furnish no fuel, and it is of course only in the smallest quantities that the people can afford to buy wood in the valley of the Durance. Their resource against the winter's cold is moving into their stables, where, huddled together in a corner cleared for the purpose, they pass four or five months. The smoky and confined air is a welcome change from the icy winds outside, and the steaming cattle are a source of grateful warmth. "This village," Neff writes, about the middle of September, from the smallest and most destitute of the hamlets of Fressinière, "is squeezed up in the very narrowest gorge of the valley, and is now buried in snow, and without the hope of seeing the sun during the rest of the winter. The houses are low, dark and dirty, and the people themselves seem to be stupefied with the utter misery of their condition."

Besides the strong appeal thus made to his sympathy, the young pastor nowhere else felt as in this valley the inspiration of his parish's history. Dourmillouse especially he regarded as the most staunchly Protestant of all the villages to which he ministered. "It is celebrated," he writes, "for the resistance which its inhabitants have opposed for more than six hundred years to the Church of Rome. They never bowed their knee before an idol, even when all the inhabitants of the valley of Queyras" (on the opposite side of the Durance, and embracing Arvieux, St. Véran and other villages) "dissembled their faith. The aspect of this desert, both terrible and sublime, which served as the asylum of truth when almost all the world lay in darkness; the recollection of the faithful martyrs of old; the deep caverns into which they withdrew to read the Bible in secret and to worship the Father of Light in spirit and in truth,--everything tends to elevate my soul." He spent here the whole of one winter and large portions of another, and it was here that he gathered his most important schools.

The rest of the field was not, however, neglected. Neff allowed himself twenty-one days for traversing his parish from end to end, and during much of the year his rounds succeeded each other with little interval. He was continually passing from the extreme of heat in sunny valleys to the arctic cold of snows and glaciers. His lodging on these journeys was in the huts of the peasants. He shared their coarse and unwholesome food, often cooked in ill-cleansed copper vessels. He slept in small, unventilated hovels, a dozen other persons often dividing with him the scanty space. He did not shrink from even the stables in winter. However exhausted he might be by hours of toilsome walking, his elastic spirit quickly revived: all thought of refreshment for himself was secondary to the spiritual wants he sought to meet in others.

Nor was he content without trying to ameliorate the temporal condition of his parishioners. By the care of his own garden he sought to teach them more intelligent and productive methods of agriculture than the rude processes to which they were accustomed. In the valley of Fressinière he built an aqueduct for purposes of irrigation, overcoming prejudice and opposition by beginning the work with his own hands. The example of Oberlin was constantly before him, and he often expresses his ambition to be to his people such a guide and helper as the pastor of Ban de la Roche had been to the peasants of the Vosges.

Neff was not long in discovering that his work must begin with the most elementary instruction. Generally, the people were ignorant of any language but their native patois. Up to this period their schoolmasters, paid at the rate of twenty-five francs a year, had been peasants like themselves. Their only time for study was such of the year as was not needed for the tilling of the niggardly soil or spent in the care of the flocks. And even the little they were able to learn was easily lost on account of the scarcity of books. Neff first addressed himself to learning the patois, and then, as he went from village to village, made ordinary teaching a part of his pastoral functions. At the beginning of his second winter he resolved to undertake the training of teachers. "I foresaw," he writes, "that the truth which I had been permitted to preach would not only not spread, but might even be lost, unless something should be done to promote its continuance." Accordingly, for five months he relinquished the more congenial general work of his parish and devoted himself to a normal school at Dourmillouse. One reason for planting it there was the inaccessibility of the place and its consequent freedom from distraction. More than twenty young men from other villages cheerfully submitted to the long confinement in this ice-bound fastness, and the people of Dourmillouse were glad to make room in their huts for the new-comers, and to add to the supplies brought by them their own scanty stores.

The following winter, his third in the High Alps, Neff again opened this school, dividing its care, however, with one of his most capable pupils of the previous year, and paying occasional visits to other parts of his parish. But now his health, never robust, began to give way under the incessant strain to which it was subjected. Early in the spring of 1829 he was forced to go to Geneva with the hope of recruiting. There, after two years of suffering, the details of which are painful beyond expression, he died at the age of thirty-one.

With our minds full of these memories we set out on the morning after our arrival at Pallons, with Pastor Charpiot as guide, to explore the valley of Fressinière and ascend to Dourmillouse. The immediate vicinity of Pallons is fair and fertile, but a short walk up the course of an impetuous torrent brought us to a narrow gorge, beyond which we found a totally different region. Bare slopes of rock that looked grim even in the sunny morning, and a waste valley-bottom, here of considerable width, but sterile and bleak, made up the landscape. Its dreariness was only increased by an occasional chalet standing beside a patch of limp and discolored potato-vines. As we went on the scene grew more and more gloomy. The tillage is in cleared spots not so large as the heaps of stones that surround them, or on bits of practicable soil left by land-slides in the midst of their hideous débris. The only trees are dwarfish pollards, reduced to bare trunks with thin tufts of green atop by the practice of stripping off the sprouts every two or three years to make fodder for the goats. Midway up the valley we passed the village of Violins. It seemed mournfully empty, and many of the houses were in reality deserted. A shy, bright-faced fellow opened the little _temple_ for our inspection, and Pastor Charpiot reminded us how its interior was not only planned by Neff, but in large measure his actual handiwork. Half an hour further on our path led us through the hamlet of Minsas, now entirely abandoned and in ruins. The desolation of the valley here becomes appalling. On either hand sheer precipices of crumbling rock rise above steep slopes of gravel and loose stones. The ground is strewn thick with great boulders, many of which had left traces of their furious descent before settling, sometimes close beside the path, or even after crossing it in a final bound. The precipices from which they had detached themselves are composed of strangely-twisted strata, and frequently recurring streaks of lurid red give them a fierce and ghastly aspect. Landslips and torrents of stones are so frequent of late years that no more attempts are made to clear away the rubbish thus deposited. Where these scourges have not fallen the sullen stream has carried devastation. Floods occur every year. That of 1856 wrought a ruin from which the villages have never rallied. In the whole upper half of the valley of Fressinière there is not, I suppose, an acre of land capable of cultivation. In the time of Neff, wretched as its condition must always have been, the poverty of this region was not so utterly hopeless as it has since become. The failure of all resources is literally driving away its inhabitants. Those who remain, as in such cases a certain proportion cannot help doing, sometimes in bad years pass three, six, and even nine, months without bread. Their small stock of potatoes is often exhausted long before it can be replenished. "I am at a loss," said the pastor, "when we are no longer able to give them aid, to know how they live. The only semblance of food left to them is soup, for which, perhaps, they haven't even salt, much less meat or vegetables. Turbid water--_de l'eau trouble, rien de plus!_"

The valley terminates abruptly at what seems an impassable wall of rock. Upon nearer approach a zigzag path up its face is discovered. Not far from the top the narrow way creeps by a ledge which barely affords foothold across a thread of sparkling foam slipping down a perpendicular precipice. In winter this passage is sheeted in dangerously unstable ice, and makes Dourmillouse inaccessible for weeks. Neff gives a spirited account in his journal of leading out a party of young peasants by torchlight, armed with axes, to cut a path here on the evening before some service in which he wished the people of the upper and lower valleys to unite. Dourmillouse lies on a slope above this difficult ascent. It is a mere group of rude chalets, like the other villages, but it has a less miserable air. The land-slides are mostly confined to the lower valley, and here the scanty Alpine pastures and steep patches of rye are out of reach of the floods. The people are seldom reduced to actual want of food, and are esteemed prosperous by their more destitute neighbors below.

Our first visit was to the old priory in which Neff held his winter schools. A row of half a dozen trees planted by him in front of the house now shuts off a good deal of much-needed sunshine, but is nevertheless carefully cherished as a memorial. Beside the priory stands the _temple_, once a Roman Catholic church, in which, before the Revolution, a priest is said to have ministered for twenty-five years without making a single convert, his own servant constituting his flock. Presently we went to rest and eat the lunch Pastor Charpiot had brought, at the house of the local _ancien_, or elder. His wife, a sturdy, smiling young woman, gave us an eager welcome. Two round-cheeked boys frisked about their old friend the pastor, and a baby--its spirits quite unclouded by its austere surroundings--crowed lustily from the cradle in which, after the fashion of the country, it was tightly strapped. It was a low, grimy room, with one square bit of a window, and far from clean. Dr. Gilly, the prim English biographer of Neff, quaintly says: "Cleanliness is not a virtue which distinguishes any of the people in these mountains; and, with such a nice sense of moral perception as they display, and with such strict attention to the duties of religion, it is astonishing that they have not yet learnt those ablutions in their persons or habitations which are as necessary to comfort as to health." I suspect, however, that the nicest "sense of moral perception" in the world would excuse the omission of a good many "ablutions" in a place where all the water that is used has to be carried more than a quarter of a mile up a steep and rough mountain-path from the nearest stream. And there was one refinement in the rude chalet not always present in regions far less removed from the centres of civilization: besides the cloth--so coarse as to be a curiosity--which the woman laid for us over an end of the unscoured table, she put at each of our places, as a matter of course, a fresh napkin of the same rude stuff.

I could not sufficiently admire the brave cheerfulness of these simple folk. Many of the villagers were busy gathering their little stock of potatoes, and all had something bright to say about their good fortune in getting them so well grown and safely stored before the frosts. It was the last week in September, and they thought the winter already close at hand. There was, too, in spite of a shrinking from strangers painfully suggestive of tendencies inherited from generations of persecuted ancestors, a degree of intelligence and self-respect often wanting among peasants far more favorably circumstanced. And it seemed to me worthy of remark that in all our walk--notwithstanding the valley's unexampled poverty--we did not encounter a single beggar. Before we left Dourmillouse the "elder" appeared, a stalwart young mountaineer with his gun slung across his shoulder. He had finished his morning's work in some distant field, and was off for a chamois-hunt among the rocks and glaciers. As a relic of our visit he gave us a block of rye bread twenty-two months old, which he chopped off the loaf with a hatchet.

We had frequent evidence in the course of our excursion that Pastor Charpiot is a real shepherd to his needy flock. Indeed, he gave to the walk an intimate and peculiar interest quite apart from its historical associations. Here he bade us go slowly on while he looked in upon a sick man, explaining that he had to be doctor as well as minister. Again he asked us to stop and share with him some of the grapes which a stout young peasant-woman was bringing on her donkey from the Durance vineyards, and which had no sweetness save in the good-will that offered them. For all whom we met he had a cheery greeting or an affectionate inquiry that showed familiar acquaintance with their concerns; and occasionally a word or two suggested a truth or hope, aptly illustrated in some passing incident, no matter how trifling or homely.

A storm was gathering in the mountains as we made our way back to Pallons through the deepening shadows of the autumn afternoon. Before we emerged from the desolate valley its gloom had grown almost intolerable; and yet this was but a suggestion of the winter horrors which the white-haired pastor at our side had faced for years in his regular ministrations at the different hamlets we had visited. Speaking of the five pastors now distributed over the field of which Neff assumed the whole charge, he said with a modesty that was quite unaffected, "All five together, we are not worth him alone" (_nous ne le valons pas_). What we had seen that day convinced us that so far at least as concerned himself his deprecation was unfounded, but in expressing it he echoed the tone that seemed universal in the High Alps in reference to the illustrious young pastor. Neff could not, of course, in his short career accomplish the permanent revolution which he dreamed of and longed for. At the same time, it cannot be said that his work has perished while not only pastors but people feel so strongly the inspiration of that heroic life.

JAMES M. BRUCE.

BLOOMING.

A little seed lay underneath the ground,
While from the south a mild wind-current blew,
And from the tropics to the northward flew
Long, angular lines of wild-fowl with a sound
Of silken wings. About that time the sun
Put forth a shining finger, and did stir
The sleeping soil to effort; whereupon
The seed made roots like webs of gossamer,
Shot up a stem, and flourished leaf and flower.
Now look, O sweet! see what your eyes have done
With just one ray of their mysterious power
Upon the germ of my heart's passion thrown!
Through all my frame steal roots of pure desire:
My dreams are blooms that shake and shine like fire.

MAURICE THOMPSON

FELIPA.

Christine and I found her there. She was a small, dark-skinned, yellow-eyed child, the offspring of the ocean and the heats, tawny, lithe and wild, shy yet fearless--not unlike one of the little brown deer that bounded through the open reaches of the pine barren behind the house. She did not come to us--we came to her: we loomed into her life like genii from another world, and she was partly afraid and partly proud of us. For were we not her guests?--proud thought!--and, better still, were we not women? "I have only seen three women in all my life," said Felipa, inspecting us gravely, "and I like women. I am a woman too, although these clothes of the son of Pedro make me appear as a boy: I wear them on account of the boat and the hauling in of the fish. The son of Pedro being dead at a convenient age, and his clothes fitting me, what would you have? It was manifestly a chance not to be despised. But when I am grown I shall wear robes long and beautiful like the señora's." The little creature was dressed in a boy's suit of dark-blue linen, much the worse for wear, and torn.

"If you are a girl, why do you not mend your clothes?" I said.

"Do you mend, señora?"

"Certainly: all women sew and mend."

"The other lady?"

Christine laughed as she lay at ease upon the brown carpet of pine needles, warm and aromatic after the tropic day's sunshine. "The child has divined me already, Catherine," she said.

Christine was a tall, lissome maid, with an unusually long stretch of arm, long sloping shoulders and a long fair throat: her straight hair fell to her knees when unbound, and its clear flaxen hue had not one shade of gold, as her clear gray eyes had not one shade of blue. Her small, straight, rose-leaf lips parted over small, dazzlingly white teeth, and the outline of her face in profile reminded you of an etching in its distinctness, although it was by no means perfect according to the rules of art. Still, what a comfort it was, after the blurred outlines and smudged profiles many of us possess--seen to best advantage, I think, in church on Sundays, crowned with flower-decked bonnets, listening calmly serene to favorite ministers, unconscious of noses! When Christine had finished her laugh--and she never hurried anything, but took the full taste of it--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 señora."

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, although we were slow to comprehend the patois of the old people, which seemed to borrow as much from the Italian tongue and the Greek as from its mother Spanish. "I know a great deal," Felipa remarked confidently, "for my father taught me. He had sailed on the ocean out of sight of land, and he knew many things. These he taught to me. Do the gracious ladies think there is anything else to know?"

One of the gracious ladies thought not, decidedly: in answer to my remonstrance, expressed in English, she said, "Teach a child like that, and you ruin her."

"Ruin her?"

"Ruin her happiness--the same thing."

Felipa had a dog, a second self--a great gaunt yellow creature of unknown breed, with crooked legs, big feet and the name Drollo. What Drollo meant, or whether it was an abbreviation, we never knew, but there was a certain satisfaction in it, for the dog was droll: the fact that the Minorcan title, whatever it was, meant nothing of that kind, made it all the better. We never saw Felipa without Drollo. "They look a good deal alike," observed Christine--"the same coloring."

"For shame!" I said.

But it was true. The child's bronzed yellow skin and soft eyes were not unlike the dog's, but her head was crowned with a mass of short black curls, while Drollo had only his two great flapping ears and his low smooth head. Give him an inch or two more of skull, and what a creature a dog would be! For love and faithfulness even now what man can match him? But, although ugly, Felipa was a picturesque little object always, whether attired in boy's clothes or in her own forlorn bodice and skirt. Olive-hued and meagre-faced, lithe and thin, she flew over the pine barrens like a creature of air, laughing to feel her short curls toss and her thin childish arms buoyed up on the breeze as she ran, with Drollo barking behind. For she loved the winds, and always knew when they were coming--whether down from the north, in from the ocean, or across from the Gulf of Mexico: she watched for them, sitting in the doorway, where she could feel their first breath, and she taught us the signal of the clouds. She was a queer little thing: we used to find her sometimes dancing alone out on the barren in a circle she had marked out with pine-cones, and once she confided to us that she talked to the trees. "They hear," she said in a whisper: "you should see how knowing they look, and how their leaves listen."

Once we came upon her most secret lair in a dense thicket of thorn-myrtle and wild smilax, a little bower she had made, where was hidden a horrible-looking image formed of the rough pieces of saw-palmetto grubbed up by old Bartolo from his garden. She must have dragged these fragments thither one by one, and with infinite pains bound them together with her rude withes of strong marsh-grass, until at last she had formed a rough trunk with crooked arms and a sort of a head, the red hairy surface of the palmetto looking not unlike the skin of some beast, and making the creature all the more grotesque. This fetich was kept crowned with flowers, and after this we often saw the child stealing away with Drollo to carry to it portions of her meals or a new-found treasure--a sea-shell, a broken saucer, or a fragment of ribbon. The food always mysteriously disappeared, and my suspicion is that Drollo used to go back secretly in the night and devour it, asking no questions and telling no lies: it fitted in nicely, however, Drollo merely performing the ancient part of the priests of Jupiter, men who have been much admired. "What a little pagan she is!" I said.

"Oh no, it is only her doll," replied Christine.

I tried several times to paint Felipa during these first weeks, but those eyes of hers always evaded me. They were, as I have said before, yellow--that is, they were brown with yellow lights--and they stared at you with the most inflexible openness. The child had the full-curved, half-open mouth of the tropics, and a low Greek forehead. "Why isn't she pretty?" I said.

"She is hideous," replied Christine: "look at her elbows."

Now, Felipa's arms _were_ unpleasant; they were brown and lean, scratched and stained, and they terminated in a pair of determined little paws that could hold on like grim Death. I shall never forget coming upon a tableau one day out on the barren--a little Florida cow and Felipa, she holding on by the horns, and the beast with its small fore feet stubbornly set in the sand; girl pulling one way, cow the other; both silent and determined. It was a hard contest, but the girl won.

"And if you pass over her elbows, there are her feet," continued Christine languidly. For she was a sybaritic lover of the fine linens of life, that friend of mine--a pre-Raphaelite lady with clinging draperies and a mediæval clasp on her belt. Her whole being rebelled against ugliness, and the mere sight of a sharp-nosed, light-eyed woman on a cold day made her uncomfortable for hours.

"Have we not feet, too?" I replied sharply.

But I knew what she meant. Bare feet are not pleasant to the eye now-a-days, whatever they may have been in the days of the ancient Greeks; and Felipa's little brown insteps were half the time torn or bruised by the thorns of the chapparal. Besides, there was always the disagreeable idea that she might step upon something cold and squirming when she prowled through the thickets knee-deep in the matted grasses. Snakes abounded, although we never saw them; but Felipa went up to their very doors, as it were, and rang the bell defiantly.

One day old Grandfather Bartolo took the child with him down to the coast: she was always wild to go to the beach, where she could gather shells and sea-beans, and chase the little ocean-birds that ran along close to the waves with that swift gliding motion of theirs, and where she could listen to the roar of the breakers. We were several miles up the river, and to go down to the ocean was quite a voyage to Felipa. She bade us good-bye joyously; then ran back to hug Christine a second time, then to the boat again; then back.

"I thought you wanted to go, child?" I said, a little impatiently, for I was reading aloud, and these small irruptions were disturbing.

"Yes," said Felipa, "I want to go; and still--Perhaps if the gracious señora would kiss me again--"

Christine only patted her cheek and told her to run away: she obeyed, but there was a wistful look in her eyes, and even after the boat had started her face, watching us from the stern, haunted me.

"Now that the little monkey has gone, I may be able at last to catch and fix a likeness of her," I said: "in this case a recollection is better than the changing quicksilver reality."

"You take it as a study of ugliness, I suppose?"

"Do not be so hard upon the child, Christine."

"Hard? Why, she adores me," said my friend, going off to her hammock under the tree.

Several days passed, and the boat returned not. I accomplished a fine amount of work, and Christine a fine amount of swinging in the hammock and dreaming. At length one afternoon I gave my final touch, and carried my sketch over to the pre-Raphaelite lady for criticism. "What do you see?" I said.

"I see a wild-looking child with yellow eyes, a mat of curly black hair, a lank little bodice, her two thin brown arms embracing a gaunt old dog with crooked legs, big feet and turned-in toes."

"Is that all?"

"All."

"You do not see latent beauty, proud courage, and a possible great gulf of love in that poor wild little face?"

"Nothing of the kind," replied Christine decidedly. "I see an ugly little girl: that is all."

The next day the boat returned, and brought back five persons--the old grandfather, Felipa, Drollo, Miguel of the island and--Edward Bowne.

"Already?" I said.

"Tired of the Madre, Kitty: thought I would come up here and see you for a while. I knew you must be pining for me."

"Certainly," I replied: "do you not see how I have wasted away?"

He drew my arm through his and raced me down the plank-walk toward the shore, where I arrived laughing and out of breath.

"Where is Christine?" he asked.

I came back into the traces at once: "Over there in the hammock. You wish to go to the house first, I suppose?"

"Of course not."

"But she did not come to meet you, Edward, although she knew you had landed."

"Of course not, also."

"I do not understand you two."

"And of course not, a third time," said Edward, looking down at me with a smile. "What do quiet, peaceful little artists know about war?"

"Is it war?"

"Something very like it, Kitty. What is that you are carrying?"

"Oh! my new sketch. What do you think of it?"

"Good, very good. Some little girl about here, I suppose?"

"Why, it is Felipa!"

"And who is Felipa? Seems to me I have seen that old dog, though."

"Of course you have: he was in the boat with you, and so was Felipa, but she was dressed in boy's clothes, and that gives her a different look."

"Oh! that boy? I remember him. His name is Philip. He is a funny little fellow," said Edward calmly.

"Her name is Felipa, and she is not a boy or a funny little fellow at all," I replied.

"Isn't she? I thought she was both," replied Ned carelessly, and then he went off toward the hammock. I turned away after noting Christine's cool greeting, and went back to the boat.

Felipa came bounding to meet me. "What is his name?" she demanded.

"Bowne."

"Buon--Buona: I cannot say it."

"Bowne, child--Edward Bowne."

"Oh! Eduardo: I know that. Eduardo--Eduardo--a name of honey."

She flew off singing the name, followed by Drollo carrying his mistress's palmetto basket in his big patient mouth; but when I passed the house a few moments afterward she was singing, or rather talking volubly of, another name--"Miguel," and "the wife of Miguel," who were apparently important personages on the canvas of her life. As it happened, I never really saw that wife of Miguel, who seemingly had no name of her own; but I imagined her. She lived on a sandbar in the ocean not far from the mouth of our river; she drove pelicans like ducks with a long switch, and she had a tame eagle; she had an old horse also, who dragged the driftwood across the sand on a sledge, and this old horse seemed like a giant horse always, outlined as he ever was against the flat bar and the sky. She went out at dawn, and she went out at sunset, but during the middle of the burning day she sat at home and polished sea-beans, for which she obtained untold sums: she was very tall, she was very yellow, and she had but one eye. These items, one by one, had been dropped by Felipa at various times, and it was with curiosity that I gazed upon the original Miguel, the possessor of this remarkable spouse. He was a grave-eyed, yellow man, who said little and thought less, applying _cui bono?_ to mental much as the city man applies it to bodily exertion, and therefore achieving, I think, a finer degree of inanition. The tame eagle, the pelicans, were nothing to him, and when I saw his lethargic, gentle countenance my own curiosity about them seemed to die away in haze, as though I had breathed in an invisible opiate. He came, he went, and that was all: exit Miguel.

Felipa was constantly with us now. She and Drollo followed the three of us wherever we went--followed the two also whenever I stayed behind to sketch, as I often stayed, for in those days I was trying to catch the secret of the barrens: a hopeless effort, I know it now. "Stay with me, Felipa," I said; for it was natural to suppose that the lovers might like to be alone. (I call them lovers for want of a better name, but they were more like haters: however, in such cases it is nearly the same thing.) And then Christine, hearing this, would immediately call "Felipa!" and the child would dart after them, happy as a bird. She wore her boy's suit now all the time, because the señora had said she "looked well in it." What the señora really said was, that in boy's clothes she looked less like a grasshopper. But this had been translated as above by Edward Bowne when Felipa suddenly descended upon him one day and demanded to be instantly told what the gracious lady was saying about her; for she seemed to know by intuition when we spoke of her, although we talked in English and mentioned no names. When told, her small face beamed, and she kissed Christine's hand joyfully and bounded away. Christine took out her beautiful handkerchief and wiped the spot.

"Christine," I said, "do you remember the fate of the proud girl who walked upon bread?"

"You think that I may starve for kisses some time?" said my friend, going on with the wiping.

"Not while I am alive," called out Edward from behind. His style of courtship _was_ of the sledge-hammer sort sometimes. But he did not get much for it on that day; only lofty tolerance, which seemed to amuse him greatly.

Edward played with Felipa very much as if she was a rubber toy or a trapeze performer. He held her out at arm's length in mid-air, he poised her on his shoulder, he tossed her up into the low myrtle trees, and dangled her by her little belt over the claret-colored pools on the barren; but he could not frighten her: she only laughed and grew wilder and wilder, like a squirrel. "She has muscles and nerves of steel," he said admiringly.

"Do put her down: she is too excitable for such games," I said in French, for Felipa seemed to divine our English now. "See the color she has."

For there was a trail of dark red over the child's thin oval cheeks which made her look strangely unlike herself. As she caught our eyes fixed upon her she suddenly stopped her climbing and came and sat at Christine's feet. "Some day I shall wear robes like the señora's," she said, passing her hand over the soft fabric; "and I think," she added after some slow consideration, "that my face will be like the señora's too."

Edward burst out laughing. The little creature stopped abruptly and scanned his face.

"Do not tease her," I said.

Quick as a flash she veered around upon me. "He does not tease me," she said angrily in Spanish; "and, besides, what if he does? I like it." She looked at me with gleaming eyes and stamped her foot.

"What a little tempest!" said Christine.

Then Edward, man-like, began to explain. "You could not look much like this lady, Felipa," he said, "because you are so dark, you know."

"Am I dark?"

"Very dark; but many people are dark, of course; and for my part I always liked dark eyes," said this mendacious person.

"Do you like my eyes?" asked Felipa anxiously.

"Indeed I do: they are like the eyes of a dear little calf I once owned when I was a boy."

The child was satisfied, and went back to her place beside Christine. "Yes, I shall wear robes like this," she said dreamily, drawing the flowing drapery over her knees clad in the little linen trousers, and scanning the effect: "they would trail behind me--so." Her bare feet peeped out below the hem, and again we all laughed, the little brown toes looked so comical coming out from the silk and the snowy embroideries. She came down to reality at once, looked at us, looked at herself, and for the first time seemed to comprehend the difference. Then suddenly she threw herself down on the ground like a little animal, and buried her head in her arms. She would not speak, she would not look up: she only relaxed one arm a little to take in Drollo, and then lay motionless. Drollo looked at us out of one eye solemnly from his uncomfortable position, as much as to say, "No use: leave her to me." So after a while we went away and left them there.

That evening I heard a low knock at my door. "Come in," I said, and Felipa entered. I hardly knew her. She was dressed in a flowered muslin gown which had probably belonged to her mother, and she wore her grandmother's stockings and large baggy slippers: on her mat of curly hair was perched a high-crowned, stiff white cap adorned with a ribbon streamer, and her lank little neck, coming out of the big gown, was decked with a chain of large sea-beans, like exaggerated lockets. She carried a Cuban fan in her hand which was as large as a parasol, and Drollo, walking behind, fairly clanked with the chain of sea-shells which she had wound around him from head to tail. The droll tableau and the supreme pride on Felipa's countenance overcame me, and I laughed aloud. A sudden cloud of rage and disappointment came over the poor child's face: she threw her cap on the floor and stamped on it; she tore off her necklace and writhed herself out of her big flowered gown, and running to Drollo, nearly strangled him in her fierce efforts to drag off his shell chains. Then, a half-dressed, wild little phantom, she seized me by the skirts and dragged me toward the looking-glass. "You are not pretty either," she cried. "Look at yourself! look at yourself!"

"I did not mean to laugh at you, Felipa," I said gently: "I would not laugh at any one; and it is true I am not pretty, as you say. I can never be pretty, child; but if you will try to be more gentle, I could teach you how to dress yourself so that no one would laugh at you again. I could make you a little bright-barred skirt and a scarlet bodice: you could help, and that would teach you to sew. But a little girl who wants all this done for her must be quiet and good."

"I am good," said Felipa--"as good as everything."

The tears still stood in her eyes, but her anger was forgotten: she improvised a sort of dance around my room, followed by Drollo dragging his twisted chain, stepping on it with his big feet, and finally winding himself up into a knot around the chair-legs.

"Couldn't we make Drollo something too? dear old Drollo!" said Felipa, going to him and squeezing him in an enthusiastic embrace. I used to wonder how his poor ribs stood it: Felipa used him as a safety-valve for her impetuous feelings.

She kissed me good-night and then asked for "the other lady."

"Go to bed, child," I said: "I will give her your good-night."

"But I want to kiss her too," said Felipa.

She lingered at the door and would not go; she played with the latch, and made me nervous with its clicking; at last I ordered her out. But on opening my door half an hour afterward there she was sitting on the floor outside in the darkness, she and Drollo, patiently waiting. Annoyed, but unable to reprove her, I wrapped the child in my shawl and carried her out into the moonlight, where Christine and Edward were strolling to and fro under the pines. "She will not go to bed, Christine, without kissing you," I explained.

"Funny little monkey!" said my lily friend, passively allowing the embrace.

"Me too," said Edward, bending down. Then I carried my bundle back satisfied.

The next day Felipa and I in secret began our labors: hers consisted in worrying me out of my life and spoiling material--mine in keeping my temper and trying to sew. The result, however, was satisfactory, never mind how we got there. I led Christine out one afternoon: Edward followed. "Do you like tableaux?" I said. "There is one I have arranged for you."