for two years; and when she chose to display her accomplishments no
one could detect any difference between her and the girls of Norfolk
and Manhattan. But it was delicious to see her at home dressed, as
she sometimes was, in the native costume, with bare shoulders and
flowing sleeves.

Bernard Brannigan was the great merchant of Coralio. Besides his
store, he maintained a train of pack mules, and carried on a lively
trade with the interior towns and villages. He had married a native
lady of high Castilian descent, but with a tinge of Indian brown
showing through her olive cheek. The union of the Irish and the
Spanish had produced, as it so often has, an offshoot of rare beauty
and variety. They were very excellent people indeed, and the upper
story of the house was ready to be placed at the service of Geddie
and Paula as soon as he should make up his mind to speak about it.

By the time two hours were whiled away the consul tired of reading.
The papers lay scattered about him on the gallery. Reclining there,
he gazed dreamily out upon an Eden. A clump of banana plants
interposed their broad shields between him and the sun. The gentle
slope from the consulate to the sea was covered with the dark-green
foliage of lemon-trees and orange-trees just bursting into bloom.
A lagoon pierced the land like a dark, jagged crystal, and above it a
pale ceiba-tree rose almost to the clouds. The waving coconut palms
on the beach flared their decorative green leaves against the slate
of an almost quiescent sea. His senses were cognizant of brilliant
scarlet and ochres and the vert of the coppice, of odors of fruit and
bloom and the smoke from Chanca's clay oven under the calabash-tree;
of the treble laughter of the native women in their huts, the song of
the robin, the salt taste of the breeze, the diminuendo of the faint