SAINT IDYL'S LIGHT
You would never have guessed that her name was Idyl—the slender, angular little girl of thirteen years who stood in her faded gown of checkered homespun on the brow of the Mississippi River. And fancy a saint balancing a bucket of water on top of her head!
Yet, as she puts the pail down beside her, the evening sun gleaming through her fair hair seems to transform it into a halo, as some one speaks her name, "Saint Idyl."
Her thin, little ears, sun-filled as she stands, are crimson disks; and the outlines of her upper arms, dimly seen through the flimsy sleeves, are as meagre as are the ankles above her bare, slim feet.
The appellation "Saint Idyl," given first in playful derision, might have been long ago forgotten but for the incident which this story records.
It was three years before, when the plantation children, colored and white together, had been saying, as is a fashion with them, what they would like to be.
One had chosen a "blue-eyed lady wid flounces and a pink fan," another a "fine white 'oman wid long black curls an' ear-rings," and a third would have been "a hoop-skirted lady wid a tall hat."
It was then that Idyl, the only white child of the group—the adopted orphan of the overseer's family—had said: