“O my! Jacko,” she cried, putting one arm over the monkey’s shoulder. “I is glad I runned away. We’s got to fairy-land at last!”
Then she put the lorgnettes to his eyes, and the creature, with a wisdom that was almost human, pretended to look through, if he did not do so in reality.
“Ach! Ach! Ach!” he cried.
“Yes,” said Teenie, “it is really a fairy-land, only—heigho! all the fairies is black, and they has nasty guns.”
Teenie was infinitely more happy now than she had been for weeks. She was a thorough wanderer at heart, and had she known Tennyson’s poems, she might have quoted him thus:—
“How delightful
To burst all links of habit—then to wander far away
On from island unto island, at the gateways of the day.
Larger constellations burning; mellow moons and happy skies,
Breadths of tropic shade, and palms of cluster, knots of Paradise.
. . . . . .
Droops the heavy blossomed bower, hangs the heavy fruited trees;
Summer isles of Eden, lying in dark purple spheres of sea.”
Truly this fairy-land of Teenie’s was beautiful beyond compare—hills green-wooded to the top, rolling woods and feathery palms, a blue or opal sea, breaking in long snowy wavelets, or on the silvery coral sand; a land of languor, a land in which a poet might laze in the bright sunshine, and dream his happy life away.
But—ah! the “but” is to come.
Nearer and nearer to this strange isle of beauty crept the Zingara; but finally, with two men in the chains to take soundings, and a hand in the foretop to look out for shoal water, she bore more to the west, as if to leave the island.
Antonio had no such intention. Having gone some miles, he went round one, and returning, struck the island on the north side, where there was, and is of course, a lovely land-locked bay; and here the anchor was lot go, and the bonnie barque swung to the tide.