toilet in the dark, with the sea-water drying coolly on my hands and face, a little heap of fruit lay beside the fire, and in the ashes camotes were roasting. Above the coals a fish broiled splutteringly. "Behold, Master," Pedro cried to me, "how it drips with fatness !"

Altogether it was a very pretty little scene of fleeting domesticity I left behind me in the circle of flickering light walled by the shadowy columns of the palms.

We walked in silence through the grove, the stranger a step in advance, -his garments glinted for an instant now and then where a ray of starlight dropped through an opening,and presently we turned to the right and passed under a ruinous vault of the old convent.

saw

Then I which had seemed to me like the roof of the world did not rise directly from the shore. Far off, mighty, lofty, its upper slopes were still raised darkly amid the stars. But nearer at hand was a less unpeopled and more level darkness, with tiny dots of yellow flame scattered through it. Γ made out the vague masses of the roofs of houses clustered among embowering trees.

that the mountain

We crossed a corner of the plaza, and stumbling over a couchant goat in his lair, were very nearly butted Then we for our indiscreetness. turned down a shadowy street so little traveled that its grassy surface was smooth and soft and noiseless under our feet.

Along one side of it stood a row of dark and silent houses set in clumps of banana behind high hedges of bamboo. On the other was a line of tiendas, little shops with their fronts all open and dim tapers burning inside. Women sat there quietly with their babies in the litter of their wares, and it was from them that I learned the name of my companion. As we passed through the bars of yellow light before the tiendas, the women peered out with wide, ques

tioning eyes, and then smiled suddenly and called: "Buenas noches, Don Feliciano."

And once we met an old and wrinkled woman with a young and blooming girl. They curtseyed low to Don Feliciano's bow, and the girl caught his hand and kissed it, an act so simple and so unaffected that it left me unsurprised, as if the pretty custom had not been dead for centuries.

Don Feliciano chided her affectionately, after he had kissed her on both cheeks. "You have not come to see me for two whole weeks," he reminded her.

"She is a godchild of mine," he explained, when they had gone on.

"I'm beginning to wonder," said I, "whether she may not have a fairy godfather?"

My companion laughed, an old man's laugh, quiet and quickly passing. "Fairies, I have heard," he objected, "are impartial. I'm afraid I'm not. I seem to love the prettiest goddaughters best. But here we

The great, sliding shutters of the windows stood wide open to the night. Insects were fluttering in and out, and a cool, damp breeze sucked through that made the candles gutter.

Down the middle of it ran a long table, unclothed, made of a single plank of the same precious wood as the floor and polished like it. On each side stood a long, backless bench, and places were laid for twoscore diners at the very least. It was a tremendous, a rather terrifying, thing for a folkless man to come so suddenly into the midst of so populous a household.

I said as much.

"Some of my godchildren," Don Feliciano explained gravely, "sometimes dropped in to dinner."

At the words, out of a far corner where the shadows had concealed them, with a shuffle of chinelas and a rustling of stiffly starched skirts, girls came trooping. From another corner came a group of men, straight young fellows in cool linen.

Don Feliciano presented me to them all, till my head was running over with names of liquid softness. And even after we had sat down, belated ones kept entering, till every place at that long table was taken. The candles glimmered down on a bank of soft brown arms and shoulders half hidden, half coquettishly revealed, under gauzy camisas of jusi and pina, and I was bewildered by the fire of demure glances shot_my way from bright, dark eyes. Don Feliciano glanced at me, too, and laughed again in his quiet way.

"You will observe," he whispered, "that the daughters outnumber the sons and are vastly prettier." There was grave mischief in his eyes.

When the long, informal meal was done, we all stood up, and in a twinkling, with the godsons tugging at them, table and benches were out of the way. More candles were lighted, and a band of men with guitars and mandolins came in.

"We dance almost every night in

Felicidad," said Don Feliciano. "It is a custom. But you do not dance?"

Perhaps his taking it for granted did not quite flatter me, but I told him that I did not.

"Neither do I," said he. "I trust you will not mind looking on, though. Your presence gives us all much pleasure.

So I sat and watched them dancing, lithe brown boys and slim brown girls in billowy robes. They glided in languorous waltzes, stepped through rigadones at once stately and romping till it seemed only a momentDon Feliciano rose from my side, and the musicians changed into "Sobre las olas." They played it through, and then the godfather of Felicidad was submerged in a wave of laughing, curtseying girls, surging up to give his hand a farewell kiss.

When I would have returned to my prau, I found that I could give Don Feliciano further pleasure, he seemed to have a capacity for pleasure, that old man,-by accepting a bed.

A

Thus it came about eventually that I found myself in a room off the sala, stretched on the cool grass mats of a high four-poster. muchacho came and dropped a tent of netting over me, and with a friendly good night blew out my candle and left me alone at last in Happiness, well enough content for the moment with my small adventures in that town.

But I knew from former disenchantments the glamour of the tropic night. "Wait," I advised my drowsy self. "wait till the day dawns and the staring sunlight is on Felicidad. Your head just now is over-full of words with that seductive sound of 'Feliz' in them. Wait for the staring sunlight, the revealer."

CHAPTER IV

THE SUN SHINES

But when the sunlight came, it was not staring. Bright, vivifying,

infinitely illuminating, it drenched the air like a golden mist.

With the easy wakefulness of an outdoor sleeper, I roused just as the level rays of it were stretched along the dew-freshened earth. As I stood by my window, even those first beams held power of heat enough to tingle on my skin through the thin stuff of my nightgear, and I waited unchilled to watch the day unfold above Felicidad.

A river, broad and slow yet flowing steadily, ran beneath the window. On its bank braus and bancas were drawn up, and in midstream an anchored lorcha tugged sturdily at her cable. Far down the last straight reach of the river, a bar of sand made out into the current. Beyond that was the blue field of the sea, sparkling and dancing with the whitecaps which a land breeze, rising even as I looked, set on it.

Above the rim of the sea, its lower limb just clear of the horizon, the sun hung suspended, a ball of fire aquiver with licking tongues of flame. I could almost see their hungry tossing, for the glare was tempered by a haze. And the blaze of it set out everything in sharpest contrast of clear light and clean-cut shadow.

Only a corner of Felicidad itself was visible, a belt of palms, a cluster of brown, shaggy roofs. But that little did not suffer by its bright illumination. It seemed clean and peaceful and complete, wonderfully complete and beyond change,-a place of simple happiness in very truth.

Early as I was, the town was astir before me. Roosters were crowing, a family party of ducks waddled sedately along the river-bank, testing the black mud with shining, yellow bills. And above the clustered roofs, thin columns of smoke rose and hung vague and indistinct against the dawn for an instant before they blew off to leeward.

A familiar sound came to my ears,

and leaning over the broad sill, I looked down on a pretty sight.

A section of a huge tree, hollowed out and stood on end, was set on the bank below. Over it, as from an oldfashioned well-sweep, a heavy pestle of hard wood was slung from a limber pole. A pair of girls were down there. Their black hair was heaped up carelessly. Their bodies, under the thin draperies which covered them, were frail and graceful with the appealing slenderness of maidenhood. They had brought out a bristling sheaf of unthreshed rice, dried in the ear, and having piled an armful. of the strawy stuff in the hollow of the mortar, they were beating the grain from its enveloping husks.

Rhythmically the heavy pestle fell to the pull of their arms and rose to the spring of the sapling. And as it thudded down on the muffling straw, it boomed out mellowly, and from the unseen parts of Felicidad other pestles answered.

As the girls worked, they laughed and chattered and sang snatches of song, being still so young, I suppose, that the joy of play and the joy of work-if there be any such thingstood intermixed and indistinguishable in their minds.

Suddenly they stopped short and stared at the shining surface of the river. A cayman-a crocodile-had risen noiselessly not far from shore and just in front of them.

He floated inertly, and the yellow water, rippling over him, stirred clumps of living slime in the joints of his leathery armor. He was a cold and ghastly thing to be alive. His death-like eyes rested on the girls and quickened with hideous eagerness, as they gazed at him, appalled. Then one of them shrank back, and the other stooped and caught up clods of earth and flung them at him with shrill taunts.

The reptile, quite unmoved, stared up at her with those unwinking eyes till a clod took him in the ugly snout. Then he sank as silently as

he had risen, except for a bubbling swirl of water.

The girl laughed then, and clapped her hands so merrily that I forgot he was a misshapen horror lurking over from an age of lurking horrors. She treated him like a neighbor from whose peculiar traits of character she might extract amusement, if she were discreet in choosing time and place.

"Swim along, old pig, you'll get no breakfast here," she told him, and returned to her interrupted work. The pestle boomed once more, her fresh young voice laughed again in the crisp morning air as she rallied. her companion on her fears. And I lounged there on my window-sill, forgetting time, till suddenly they both glanced up and caught me.

The timid one, with a little cry of surprise, ran straight away, shuffling in her chinelas. Even the other would have liked to run, I fancied. But some instinct of vicarious hospitality, of standing for the house, must have restrained her. And perhaps some pride as well. At any rate she stood looking up at me, with a hand fluttering above her loosened hair.

"Good morning, Senor," she said, demure enough.

"It is a good morning, pretty one," said I. "I saw you scare that old cayman away."

Forgetting her self-consciousness, she laughed, a soft ripple of sound. "People are afraid of him," she explained. "He eats them, you know." "You didn't seem very much

afraid," said I.

"Oh, no," she said, "I'm never afraid of anything. Still I think that this time he wanted to eat me."

"That," said I, "would not be pleasant-for you."

"No." she agreed, "I shouldn't like it." Her eyes sparkled with mischief. "When I am eaten," she announced, "I'd rather it would be aman, Senor!" Then she, too, took flight, dismayed by her own audacity. "And there are reptilian reptilian men

enough," thought I, "floating along the muddy waters of life with dead, watchful eyes-"

There was a tap at the door and the muchacho who had blown out my candle the night before came in. "Good morning, Master," he said. "Good morning, friend," I answered. "And it is good."

"Yes, it is," said the muchacho. "Good as a miracle. The canoes have just put in to the beach with more fish than two men could count." "The fish of Happiness, famously fat?" I asked him.

"The same," said the muchacho, a trifle puzzled. To steady himself, he plumped his foot down on a fact. "Don Feliciano says," said he, "that chocolate will be ready in the sala whenever it pleases you to wish it."

As I dressed, I thought a little, comparing this with other mornings and wondering why it was that on this one occasion a bit of sunlight in the air and on the sea, the daily renewed blessing of a draught of fishes I should never taste, the flutter of a girl's hand above her flying hair, even an ancient cayman floating like a living death, should all together have made a morning so miraculously good.

"Wait," I warned myself, "till the freshness of dawn has left the air, and the heat of the day is come." Whereupon. I went out with good appetite to the chocolate which so obligingly waited on my wishes.

CHAPTER V

EARLY BREAKFAST IS SPOKEN OF One side of the sala faced the east. On that side all the shutters were slid back, so that there was no wall between householders and the morning.

The sunshine flooded all the polished floor. All the great room was radiant with it, save only the high vault beneath the rafters. And even there irrepressible beams had broken through the thatching in a dozen

places, and dancing motes transformed them to molten bars of gold laid across the dimness.

The long table was still shoved back against the wall. Right before the window was set a smaller one, a more companionable piece of timber with three or four tall armchairs of black wood marshaled about it.

In one of these Don Feliciano was enthroned, his thin profile dark, yet glowing against the light outside. In a second sat Doña Ceferina, a lady whose acquaintance I had little

chance to cultivate the night before. She had been so very busy with the hospitable duties of her household,and so cumbersomely hurried, like a battleship trying to bustle.

She was not busy now, but still she seemed to be preoccupied. So it appeared, was Don Feliciano. For though his greeting was of the most. friendly sort, he broke it off to send the message to his cook that the chocolate might now be prepared.

Then he turned to me again, assuring me that he found inexpressible pleasure in learning that I had slept well in the poor bed he had to offer me-I smiled at that, remembering the sand which had been my destined couch-and that I doubled the debt of pleasure given by caring to take my breakfast there.

But the cause of all that pleasure had hardly settled himself in a third chair by the table, whereon a silver platter heaped with crusty rolls stood -sat, lay at length, reposed-in solitary dignity, before Don Feliciano interrupted himself to send a second message, asking where the chocolate might be.

The message sent, he seemed relieved and master of himself once more, though Doña Ceferina still sat bolt upright with her hands clenched on the arms of her chair. I ventured a rather elaborate remark on the freshness of the morning.

I was no more than half way through my involved Castilian period, with a neatly terminative verb

of which I was somewhat enamored waiting for me in plain sight, though unattainable as yet for the duenna of a phrase which balked my wooing, when Don Feliciano sprang to his feet.

"Perhaps," said he to his wife, "I'd better ask about it myself?"

"Perhaps you had, Escalante," said his wife, so very suddenly that frail Don Feliciano, speeding kitchenwards, seemed rather to have been shot on the explosive violence of her speech.

Though disconcerted, I disconcerted, I was directing the remainder of my ill-fated sentence at Doña Ceferina when she too rose, as hastily as she well could, and steamed off heavily. "What do men know about it?" was her Sphinxlike farewell, muttered to empty air in a contemptuous manner.

I had not yet disentangled myself from the small complexities of the situation, when my hosts returned as suddenly as they had gone, Don Feliciano grave and self-contained once more, Doña Ceferina sighing contentedly. Behind them a stately muchacho bore high on a salver a tall iron pot of steaming, frothing chocolate.

Thus for the first time I had a hint of the solemnity which in Felicidad, at least, invests the taking of that morning draught. Not yet did I grasp it wholly. One can not do that till the chocolate of Happiness has been brewed beneath one's own rooftree. But a glimmer of understanding came to me, and I should not have wondered longer at the preoccupation of my hosts, even had their suddenly altered bearing not assured me that it was only for a moment they had been helpless in the grip of an emotion stronger than hospitality itself.

Now Don Feliciano was all anxiety for me alone. The amount of pleasure I could have created out of thin air by letting him deive to the very depths of the reposeful platter (Continued on page 43)