"Yes, but he wasn't Washington's aide-de-camp nor secretary of the treasury in the tropics!" "True; nevertheless, when he was Nicholas Cruger's bookkeeper at the age of twelve he wrote to an American friend: 'I contemn the groveling condition of a clerk to which my fortunes condemn me, and I would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station.... My youth excludes me from any hope of immediate preferment, but I mean to prepare the way for futurity.' You see the yeast was stirring, even in the tropics, Dolly!" "Well, I feel no yeast stirring in me," she said languidly. "All the morning I have been trying to recapture a certain 'Ode to a Cow' written by a man of action in a country hotel where mother and I were sojourning last summer. I could have echoed it when I first regarded the inhabitants of these islands, and now anybody might say it of me, for I grow more and more cow-like with every passing day. It runs this way: "'ODE TO A CUD-CHEWING COW "'Why, Cow, art thou so satisfied, So well content with all things here below, So meek, so lazy, and so awful slow? Dost thou not know that men's affairs are mixed? That grievously the world needs to be fixed? That nothing we can do has any worth? That life is care and trouble and untowardness? Prit, Cow! This is no time for idleness! The cud thou chewest is not what it seems. Get up and moo! Tear round and quit thy dreams!'" By this time Dorothea was asleep. Her book slid to the floor, I shaded her face with my green umbrella, pulled down her muslin frock over her pretty ankles, and gave myself up to vagrant thoughts of her probable future. Sunday on shipboard is a good day for reflections and heart-searchings. My own problem, after all, is not so baffling as Dolly's. She is as loyal as a charming and sensible girl can be to a mother like Mrs. Valentine, whose soul, if the truth were told, is about the size of a mustard-seed. A frivolous, useless, bird-minded woman is Dolly's mother; a woman pecking at life as a canary pecks at its cuttlefish, simply to sharpen its bill. How the girl can respect her I cannot imagine! I suppose flesh calls to flesh and she loves her without too much analysis, but they seem to have come to the parting of the ways. It is Dolly's highest self that is in love with Marmaduke Hogg, and I don't believe she will sacrifice it to a maternal whim and call it filial obedience. Perhaps the absence that makes the heart grow fonder is working like a philter in this journey planned by Mrs. Valentine with a far different purpose.