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She learned where the sea-birds, with white bosoms and brown wings, made their hidden nests of sand, and where the cranes waded for their prey, and where the beautiful wild-ducks, plumaged in satiny lilac and silken green, found their food, and where the best reeds grew to furnish stems for Feliu's red-clay pipe, and where the ruddy sea-beans were most often tossed upon the shore, and how the gray pelicans fished all together, like men moving in far-extending semicircles, beating the flood with their wings to drive the fish before them.

Mateo, who had come to the country while a boy, spoke English better than the rest of the cheniere people; he acted as interpreter whenever Feliu found any difficulty in comprehending or answering questions; and he told them of the child rescued that wild morning, and of Feliu's swim. His recital evoked a murmur of interest and excitement, followed by a confusion of questions.

But he woke before day with a feeling of intense prostration, a violent headache, and such an aversion for the mere idea of food that Feliu's invitation to breakfast at five o'clock gave him an internal qualm. Perhaps a touch of malaria. In any case he felt it would be both dangerous and useless to return to town unwell; and Feliu, observing his condition, himself advised against the journey.

Many a time before she had met it face to face, in Havanese summers; she knew how to wrestle with it; she had torn Feliu's life away from its yellow clutch, after one of those long struggles that strain even the strength of love. Now she feared mostly for Chita. She had ordered the girl under no circumstances to approach the cabin.

Persistently and furiously, at half-past two o'clock of an August morning, Sparicio rang Dr. La Brierre's night-bell. He had fifty dollars in his pocket, and a letter to deliver. He was to earn another fifty dollars deposited in Feliu's hands, by bringing the Doctor to Viosca's Point. He had risked his life for that money, and was terribly in earnest.

Feliu's was not a joyous nature; he had his dark hours, his sombre days; yet it was rarely that he felt too sullen to yield to the little one's petting, when she would leap up to reach his neck and to coax his kiss, with "Dame un beso, papa! asi; y otro! otro! otro!" He grew to love her like his own; was she not indeed his own, since he had won her from death?

"Who knows?" he answered, at last; "who knows? Perhaps she has ceased to belong to any one else." One after another, Feliu's luggers fluttered in, bearing with them news of the immense calamity. And all the fishermen, in turn, looked at the child. Not one had ever seen her before. Ten days later, a lugger full of armed men entered the bayou, and moored at Viosca's wharf.

But it seemed fated that Feliu's waif should never be identified; diligent inquiry and printed announcements alike proved fruitless. Sea and sand had either hidden or effaced all the records of the little world they had engulfed: the annihilation of whole families, the extinction of races, had, in more than one instance, rendered vain all efforts to recognize the dead.

But time is life now; and the tiny hands must be pulled away from the fair dead neck, and the scarf taken to bind the infant firmly to Feliu's broad shoulders, quickly, roughly; for the ebb will not wait ...

The word all at once bursts from Feliu's mouth, with that peculiar guttural snarl of the "r" betokening strong excitement, while he points to something rocking in the ebb, beyond the foaming of the shell-reef, under a circling of gulls. More dead?