mother brings in her own baby girl,--a little darling just able
to walk. She has extraordinary eyes;--the mother's eyes
magnified (the father's are small and fierce). I bargain for the
single pair of thin rings on her little wrists;--while the smith
is taking them off, the child keeps her wonderful gaze fixed on
my face. Then I observe that the peculiarity of the eye is the
size of the iris rather than the size of the ball. These eyes
are not soft like the mother's, after all; they are ungentle,
beautiful as they are; they have the dark and splendid flame of
the eyes of a great bird--a bird of prey.

... She will grow up, this little maid, into a slender, graceful
woman, very beautiful, no doubt; perhaps a little dangerous. She
will marry, of course: probably she is betrothed even now,
according to Indian custom,--pledged to some brown boy, the son
of a friend. It will not be so many years before the day of
their noisy wedding: girls shoot up under this sun with as swift
a growth as those broad-leaved beautiful shapes which fill the
open door-way with quivering emerald. And she will know the
witchcraft of those eyes, will feel the temptation to use them,--
perhaps to smile one of those smiles which have power over life
and death.

[Illustration: COOLIE SERVANT.]

And then the old coolie story! One day, in the yellowing cane-
fields, among the swarm of veiled and turbaned workers, a word is
overheard, a side glance intercepted;--there is the swirling
flash of a cutlass blade; a shrieking gathering of women about a
headless corpse in the sun; and passing cityward, between armed