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Some old fears began to vanish, and her nights were no longer disturbed with horrible dreams of monsters and demons. But of all things in and about Old Studley Ah Lon most detested Mike the raven, and Mike seemed fully to return her dislike. He pecked viciously at the spindly Chinese legs and sent Ah Lon into convulsions of terror.

She had better luck with her fishing than any one would have expected, and the very first day she brought home a couple of spindly fishes. She was elated over her success, as can be imagined, and received praise from her mother for being able to provide food for the family, when she was only a little girl of eight. To encourage the child, Katrina let her cleanse and fry the fish.

Meeting Fishhead one day in the spring on the spindly scaffolding of the skiff landing at Walnut Log, and being themselves far overtaken in liquor and vainglorious with a bogus alcoholic substitute for courage, the brothers had accused him, wantonly and without proof, of running their trot-line and stripping it of the hooked catch an unforgivable sin among the water dwellers and the shanty boaters of the South.

Devil knows what I would have given for a real regular quarrel a more decent, a more LITERARY one, so to speak. I had been treated like a fly. This officer was over six foot, while I was a spindly little fellow. But the quarrel was in my hands. I had only to protest and I certainly would have been thrown out of the window. But I changed my mind and preferred to beat a resentful retreat.

"There's some real ground ahead; I can see the tops of some pines." Half an hour later they entered a stretch of open country. A few spindly pines grew near the river. To the north and west, as far as the eye could reach, was a prairie, covered with a sparse growth of grass.

But that Saturday morning he realized what the woman was to be like, when the hem of the velvet skirt no longer hung high above spindly black legs and the bobbed hair had been allowed to grow and grow, far below the tiny ears which it now barely covered.

Kenset went swiftly across the cabin to that part which served as kitchen, and took from a curtain-covered set of shelves, a shiny nickel object on spindly legs, which he brought and placed near Tharon on the table. He struck a match and presently a clean blue flame grew up beneath it. He lifted the lid and filled the small pot, thereby exposed, with water from the bucket on a bench.

Though all I wanted to return for was to show the school, that, in spite of my spindly legs, I could win my "H" in track athletics. I must make good at this job, and save ... my grandmother, who had sent me money the previous year, I must not call on her again.

"As tu trouvé mon livre?" One morning, just at dawn, we drew near a low, sandy coast, and anchored at the mouth of the great estuary of the Gironde. A spindly lighthouse was flashing, seeming more to reflect the sunlight from outside than to be burning within, and a current the color of coffee and cream with a dash of vermilion in it, went by us mottled with patches of floating mud. From the deck one had an extraordinary view, a ten-mile sweep of the strangely colored water, the hemisphere of the heavens all of one greenish-blue tint, and a narrow strip of nondescript, sandy coast suspended somehow between the strange sea and unlovely sky. At noon, the Rochambeau began at a good speed her journey up the river, passing tile-roofed villages and towns built of pumice-gray stone, and great flat islands covered with acres upon acres of leafy, bunchy vines. There was a scurry to the rail; some one cried, "Voil

"I saw one of your pictures an abominable thing in some needlework magazine. A woman with a spindly nose, picking flowers." He glanced at her and caught an eager smile in her eyes. She was someone to whom he could talk at random. This pleased him; or perhaps it was the sense of flattery that pleased him. He wondered if she was intelligent. They had met several times, usually by accident.