Smugglers' Island and the devil fires of San Moros

by Clarissa A. Kneeland

Her type worked well enough, but it would be too much bother to whittle out the whole alphabet. The little letters would be beyond her skill, anyway, and it would be slower printing one type at a time than it was writing them. But by that time she had thought of a way whereby she might make a few types serve for the whole alphabet, as all letters are composed of curves and straight lines.

The curves she could make of quills, which were finer than anything she could whittle out, and the straight lines she made on the end of a little bone, two of them,—one for long lines, one for short ones. Four quills properly cut furnished her with an assortment of curves, and she could hold all six in her left hand between the first and middle fingers, which was better than laying them down and picking them up each time she wished to change. It was too much bother to change with every letter, too, so she would take one and make all she wanted of that kind clear across the page, then she would change and make all of another kind, and so on. She soon learned to gauge her distances properly.

It was no quicker than writing, but she could put her lines closer together, thus getting more on a page, and her letters were more uniform, and there were no more blots. It used the ink up faster than plain writing, for it dried out from the pad, but, as it chanced, there were plenty of ink materials.

The children were delighted; it was easier to read than the old-time script, and it looked so neat and businesslike.

In those soft skin books Marian put every poem or set of verses that she could remember. She began with Mother Goose rhymes and graded on up to “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and “Thanatopsis,” which she had learned to speak at school. Into one book went Bible verses and several whole chapters from the holy book, notably the twenty-third Psalm and the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians.

Anything and everything pleased the children. They learned to read everything and to repeat a great deal by heart. Esther especially was a perfect little parrot and could reel off all kinds of lofty sentiment of the meaning of which she had no conception. Jennie and Delbert always had to study longer on a thing, and Davie, where lessons were concerned, was a little lazybones. Davie never learned anything that he did not have to, and Marian had such a time getting the fundamentals well rooted in his memory that she never tried to plant anything there that was not necessary. He was as quick and keen as any of them in other things, though, and it filled Marian’s heart with pride to see how fearless he was in the water and how little he was behind the others in that element.

As fast as she could, Marian replaced the rabbit-skin clothes with the newer, better ones, but the style of making was the same,—low-necked, sleeveless dresses with rather scant, short skirts, for material was scarce. Delbert still clung to his “loin-cloth,” and Marian was more than willing, it was so much simpler than trousers. Even David, for the sake of wearing some of the product of their combined labor, consented to be clothed like Delbert, and as he found a loin-cloth did not impede his actions in any way, he continued to sport one from then on. There was one thing in favor of the new clothes: they certainly wore well; there was no shoddy in them.

Gradually Jennie spent more and more time at the wickiup. For one thing, the children did not like to go off and leave Marian alone all the morning, and as Davie was growing so big that he could help appreciably, there was really no need for so many of them on the morning excursions.

So Jennie stayed with Marian. Her particular forte was making baskets. Jennie could make beautiful baskets. She wove them of straws and tough weeds and palm-leaf. Her only teachers were her memories of certain kindergarten lessons, the big basket they had brought their lunch in, and a rather blurry picture down in one corner of the old newspaper of a half-dozen Indian baskets with strange designs. For the rest she taught herself, and when she once got interested in the work she wanted to do nothing else.

It was Jennie who made a basket of split palm-leaves to take the place of the old barrel on the Muggywah. She would sit for hours on the seaweed carpet of the wickiup, leaning against the pile of bedding, and weave and weave, the work growing much faster under her slim brown fingers than it did under Marian’s. Indeed, after Jennie took to making baskets, Marian and the rest quit. What was the use of their wasting their time when Jennie could do it so much better and quicker?