She did not hear him; yet she did swallow the few drops that were turned into her mouth, and the good man's predictions proved correct, for in a few moments she opened her eyes, but turned her head, hid her face in the blankets on which she was lying.
"She is afraid of our hard old faces," remarked the sailor who was bending over her; "but we will soon be where there will be more agreeable ones. Give way, boys, they are waiting for us," and rising, he left the "wee" stranger to herself.
"I should think she would have got used to ugly faces if she has been where there's a glass," remarked the third of the party, rather cruelly, but laughing and good-natured. They reached the schooner, and the wearied child was handed on board, amid many exclamations and intermingling remarks of sympathy and astonishment.
There were two women down in the small cabin; one the wife of Mike, who, in accordance with the kindness natural to her people, took the little outcast mariner under her especial care, and, with feminine instincts, provided for her wants.
The next few days the diminutive figure of Phebe Blunt sat upon the dark, dingy chest beneath the small narrow window in the cabin, looking out upon the blue, blue sea her beating heart so much loved, as it gathered up the jewels of emerald, and gold, and crystal pearls which the sunbeams scattered upon the wavelets' snowy crests, and with them her fancy built a palace of its own, to which in after years memory would often return and bear away some precious stones to adorn her sober real life.
"Ye're a strange child," said Cathreen, one day, after watching her for a long time, as she sat coiled up on the heavy chest, her large eyes peering from the window at the dark waters over which they were sailing. "What makes ye look so much at the sea? I'd rather see the land any time; and I wouldn't care a farthing if I never put my eyes on a bit of water again as long as I live." The child turned her beaming face towards the speaker with an expression of wonder and incredulity playing over it.
"How can it?" she asked at last, as her little brown hands brushed back the mass of dark hair from her broad forehead.
"Can what?" and the two women laughed heartily.
"Walk on the water. I couldn't, and I don't believe He could," and the bewildered gaze was turned again out of the narrow window.
"Who, child? Are you beside yourself?"