She said "Yes," and would have thought so if it had not been for the memory of that moment, already faded, when she had seen the jonquil. As it was, she sent a quick thought out to the boy who lay playing with imaginings by the alders; a thought of vague regret and a faint hope that it might not be with him quite as it had been with her. And whether the thought reached his unknowing self or not, to Manuel's fancy the leat had a finer tale and brighter hopes to tell him that evening than usual, and he was at the age when, although he knew the corresponding fall on entering the house must be the more severe, he never doubted that the dreams were worth it. THE COFFIN SHIP Of all the ships that traded from the Islands to the mainland, the _Spirito Santo_ had the worst reputation. She was known as a "hungry" vessel; her chief mate was a French Creole from Martinique who had been trained aboard a Yankee clipper, and her captain was a blue-nose who behaved as such. Since, on the outward voyage, the crew generally consisted of men who had made the Islands too hot to hold them, and, on the return trip, of half-dazed sailors who had been doped by crimps, there was a certain superficial variety about it--a variety merely of individuals and not of kind. The _Spirito Santo_ had been a good enough ship in her day, and had weathered a typhoon in the China seas and a hurricane in the Atlantic, but she was one of the earliest steam vessels built, and had started life as a side-wheeler; her paddles having been changed for a single screw and simple engines, of the kind guaranteed to combine the greatest possible consumption of fuel with a correspondingly large waste of steam.