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Miss Sally made her a strong punch with her own hands, "just the way she said she liked it," and Louisa bathed her face in fragrant cologne, and tried on a lace night-cap with a great deal of fuss. Some one came in to turn down the night-lamp a little later on a quiet, slender figure in a dark-brown gown. It was not Mrs. Pendleton, nor was it either of her daughters.
In front of him stood a dark-skinned native, carrying a handsome silver hanger in imitation of the sword-bearers of European monarchs; behind the king sat a boy holding a basin of dark-brown wood, in which his Majesty ever and anon spat abundantly. Instead of a crown the king's head was covered by an old beaver hat. His coat was of coarse woven cloth of ancient cut, with large metal buttons.
The houses are built of rather large, dark-brown, adobe bricks; the walls are usually white plastered; the roofs of all the houses are tiled, and the supporting rafters of the roof extend out far beyond the front wall of the house, so that the passer on the footpath is sheltered against rain and the noonday sun. The outer ends of these rafters are cut to give an ornamental effect.
The surface of the land was thrown or washed up into dark-brown hillocks of broken argillaceous schist, which repelled vegetation, but the hollows were wooded with mountain oak and many shrubs. Farther down there were other hillocks, equally bare, but formed of the blue-looking lias marl which the husbandman detests with good reason, for its sterility is incorrigible.
I have already indicated that I am a sound, moderately healthy, vigorous man, with a slight tendency to run to fat. I am five feet ten inches tall, weigh a hundred and sixty-two pounds, have gray eyes, a rather aquiline nose, and a close-clipped dark-brown mustache, with enough gray hairs in it to give it dignity. My movements are quick; I walk with a spring.
Fairchild managed to voice the fact that he would be willing to help without remuneration, as he hurried forward, still staring at her, a vibrant little thing with dark-brown wisps of hair which had been blown from beneath her cap straying about equally dark-brown, snapping eyes and caressing the corners of tightly pressed, momentarily impatient lips.
He waited and watched, and presently a dark-brown animal, two or three feet in length and about the shape of an egg, came scrambling cautiously down the trunk. The porky reached the ground in safety, and searched among the tin plates and the knives and forks until he found a piece of bacon rind; but he got just one taste of it, and then Louis hit him over the head with a club.
The officers were leaning over the taffrail, trying, with a sportsman-like anxiety worthy of better prey, to hook a shark, which was slowly meandering under the stern; or looking contemplatively into the dark-brown waves, either watching the many forms of animal life which floated by, or recalling to memory the dear objects of distant lands.
A thick, burly man under thirty years of age, some five feet five in height, with broad sallow face, brawny bull-neck, and wide square-set shoulders a squat Hercules; dark-brown hair, cut short, lies close to his head; he is bearded, and has a dark-brown pointed moustache; shaggy brows overhang his small steel-gray eyes; his nose is coarse and devoid of character; but his jaws are massive, his lips firm, and his chin determined.
This morning they brought the child to be fitted; she is very tall and thin, but lithe and supple, with dark hair, and large, bright, dark-brown eyes. She will be very handsome. I could not quite make her out; she is not an ordinary gentlewoman, nor is she the very least vulgar or common. She gives me more the idea of a wild thing not quite tamed.
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