The hacienda, or ingenio as it is more properly called, was several miles of yellow striated with red, punctuated with palms and cut by paths that were shaded with the great glistening leaves of the banana, while here and there, Dantesque and unnatural in its grandeur, rose the ceiba, its giant arms outstretched as though to shield the toiler from the suffocation of the purple skies. And beneath, for contrast, the brilliance of convolvuli and granadillas opposed the tender green. At the southernmost end was Don Jayme's habitation, a one-story edifice, built quadrangularwise, tiled and steep of roof, and semi-circled by a veranda so veiled with vines that at a distance the house seemed a massive mound of pistache. "Even in Andalusia," thought Ruis, as the volante brought him to the door, "there is nothing equal to this." Like all his race, he had a quick eye to the beautiful, and for the moment he was bewildered by the riot of color. And while the bewilderment still lingered, a gentleman, slim and tall, entirely in white, with face and hands of the shade of Turkish tobacco, kissed him on either cheek. "God be praised, my son," he murmured, "you are here." And with that he led him into the cool of the veranda. It had been years since they had met, there was much to be said, and in that grave unvociferous fashion which is peculiar to the Spaniard of Castile, in a language which nightingales might envy, father and son discussed topics of common and personal interest. Thereafter for some little time, a fortnight to be exact, things went very well indeed. Ruis expressed himself enchanted with his new home. The plantation was a wonder to him, the half-naked negroes and their wholly nude progeny a surprise, and the brutality with which they were treated caused him a transient emotion. In turtle fishing he found an agreeable novelty, and in the shooting of doves and the blue-headed partridge he became an immediate adept. But when a fortnight had come and gone he felt vaguely bored; he grew tired of strange and sticky fruits, the call of chromatic birds jarred, discordant, on his nerves, the turtles lost their allurement, the weight of purple days oppressed him. In brief, he thought he had quite enough of rural life in the tropics. Aside from his father, there was not, on the estate, a soul of his own race with whom he could exchange a word. And though he had nothing whatever to say, yet such is the nature of youth that he heartily wished himself back in Spain. The young girl that lived there over the way he would have hailed as life's full delight, and two or three of her scrappy letters, which through some oversight he had neglected to turn into cigarette-lighters, he set to work to decipher anew. The writer of them was an ethereal young person with a pretty taste for fine sentiments, and as Ruis possessed himself of the candors of her thought, he very much wished that he could kneel immediately at her feet.