habitations defended by them ...


II.

Before a little waxen image of the Mother and Child,--an odd
little Virgin with an Indian face, brought home by Feliu as a
gift after one of his Mexican voyages,--Carmen Viosca had burned
candles and prayed; sometimes telling her beads; sometimes
murmuring the litanies she knew by heart; sometimes also reading
from a prayer-book worn and greasy as a long-used pack of cards.
It was particularly stained at one page, a page on which her
tears had fallen many a lonely night--a page with a clumsy wood
cut representing a celestial lamp, a symbolic radiance, shining
through darkness, and on either side a kneeling angel with folded
wings. And beneath this rudely wrought symbol of the Perpetual
Calm appeared in big, coarse type the title of a prayer that has
been offered up through many a century, doubtless, by wives of
Spanish mariners,--Contra las Tempestades.

Once she became very much frightened. After a partial lull the
storm had suddenly redoubled its force: the ground shook; the
house quivered and creaked; the wind brayed and screamed and
pushed and scuffled at the door; and the water, which had been
whipping in through every crevice, all at once rose over the
threshold and flooded the dwelling. Carmen dipped her finger in
the water and tasted it. It was salt!

And none of Feliu's boats had yet come in;--doubtless they had
been driven into some far-away bayous by the storm. The only