Yet Mary lifted the glass a little higher, beyond the green, beyond the crimpling wavelets of the nearer distance that seemed drawn by the magical lens almost into her hand, out to the fine, straight line that cut the cool blue below from the boundless blue above. Round swung the glass, slowly, waveringly, in her unpractised hand, from the low cypress forests of Manchac on the west, to the skies that glittered over the unseen marshes of the Rigolets on the farthest east. "You see sail yondeh?" came the slow inquiry from behind. "No," said Mary, letting the instrument down, and resting it on the balustrade. "Humph! No! Dawn't I tell you is no use look?" "He was to have got here three days ago," said Mary, shutting the glass and gazing in anxious abstraction across the prairie. The Spanish Creole grunted. "When win' change, he goin' start. He dawn't start till win' change. Win' keep ligue dat, he dawn't start 't all." He moved his orange-wood staff an inch, to suit the previous movement of his feet, and Mary came and laid the glass on its brackets in the veranda, near the open door of a hall that ran through the dwelling to another veranda in the rear. In the middle of the hall a small woman, as dry as the peppers that hung in strings on the wall behind her, sat in a rush-bottomed rocking-chair plaiting a palmetto hat, and with her elbow swinging a tattered manilla hammock, in whose bulging middle lay Alice, taking her compulsory noonday nap. Mary came, expressed her thanks in sprightly whispers, lifted the child out, and carried her to a room. How had Mary got here?