Again a steamer, from foreign parts, has visited that lonely coast and again a boat has been lowered. In the boat is my fanciful father accompanied by four of his evil henchmen and accompanied also by another woman. She is young and fair, another virgin; but now, alas, father has become hardened on that subject! The strange woman is terribly afraid but is at the same time in love with her captor (owing to the strange natures of women, this, you will understand, is entirely possible), and father has had the cruel impulse to bring the two women together. Perhaps he wants to see them suffer the pangs of jealousy. But he will get no such pangs from mother. With her son beside her she lies silently waiting. For what? That is the question that, try as he would, the son could not answer. And so the two lie there in silence on the poor bed in the hut while that strange monster of a man drags another woman across the yellow sands and in at the door of the hut. What has happened is that he has gone back to his old wicked life and, with his comrade, has joined another revolutionary party in another South American republic, and this time the revolution has been successful and he and his partners have helped sack a South American city. At the forefront of the invaders was my fanciful father and--whatever else may be said of him it can never be said that he lacked in courage--it was from him, in fact, that I got my own courage. Into the invaded city he had rushed at the head of his men and, when the city was being sacked, he demanded riches for his men but took none for himself. For his own portion of the loot he had taken the virginal daughter of the leader of the Federal forces and it was this woman he was now dragging in at the door of our hut. She was very beautiful and perhaps, had I been older, I should not have blamed father, but at that time the love of right was very strong in me. When father saw that I had already been born he staggered back for a step and leaned against the wall of the cabin, still however clinging to the hand of his new-found woman. “I had hoped to arrive before or at the very hour of birth, I had counted on that,” he muttered, cursing under his breath. For a moment he stood looking at mother and myself and both of us looked calmly at him. “Birth--the birth hour--is the test of womanhood,” he said, taking hold of the shoulder of his new woman and shaking her violently, as though to fix her attention. “I wanted you to see how the women of my own race meet bravely all such trying situations; for, as you must know, by the customs of my country, the woman who marries an American becomes instantly an American, with all the American virtues. It is our climate, I dare say, and it happens to people very quickly. “At any rate there it is. The woman you see before you I really love, but she has become Anglo-Saxon, through having married me, and is therefore above me, as far above me as the stars.