He did so, sitting on the front edge of his chair-seat, and sprawling his legs now in front and now behind him as he swung now around to his wife and now to the Doctor. Mary laughed softly at every period, and watched the Doctor, to see his slight smile at each detail of the story. Richling enjoyed telling it; he had worked; his earnings were in his pocket; gladness was easy.
“Why, I’m learning more from Raphael Ristofalo than I ever learned from my school-masters: I’m learning the art of livelihood.”
He ran on from Ristofalo to the men among whom he had been mingling all day. He mimicked the strange, long swing of their Sicilian speech; told of their swarthy faces and black beards, their rich instinct for color in costume; their fierce conversation and violent gestures; the energy of their movements when they worked, and the profoundness of their repose when they rested; the picturesqueness and grotesqueness of the negroes, too; the huge, flat, round baskets of fruit which the black men carried on their heads, and which the Sicilians bore on their shoulders or the nape of the neck. The “captain” of the schooner was a central figure.
“Doctor,” asked Richling, suddenly, “do you know anything about the island of Cozumel?”
“Aha!” thought Mary. So there was something besides the day’s earning that elated him.
She had suspected it. She looked at her husband with an expression of the most alert pleasure. The Doctor noticed it.
“No,” he said, in reply to Richling’s question.
“It stands out in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Yucatan,” began Richling.
“Yes, I know that.”
“Well, Mary, I’ve almost promised the schooner captain that we’ll go there. He wants to get up a colony.”