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 the places. I'll suppose I'm there!
Look, Mrs. Bunker! here's a whole green sea; the tiniest little dots
all over it."

"Dots? You'd hardly see all over one of those dots if you were in
one. That's the South Sea, Miss Lucy, and those are the loveliest
isles, except, may be, the West Indies, that ever I saw."