The house she had selected was a typical old-fashioned French cottage, venerable in scaling plaster and fern-tufted tile roof, but cool and roomy within as uninviting without. A small inland garden surprised the eye as one entered the battened gate at its side, and a dormer-window in the roof looked out upon the rigging of ships at anchor but a stone's-throw away. Here, to the chamber above, Evelyn led her father. Furnishing this large upper room with familiar objects, and pointing out the novelties of the view from its window, she tried to interpret his new life happily for him, and he smiled, and seemed content. It was surprising to see how soon mammy fell into line with the changed order of things. The French Market, with its "cuyus fureign folks an' mixed talk," was a panorama of daily unfolding wonders to her. "But huccome dee calls it French?" she exclaimed, one day. "I been listenin' good, an' I hear 'em jabber, jabber, jabber all dey fanciful lingoes, but I 'ain't heern nair one say _polly fronsay_, an' yit I know dats de riverend book French." The Indian squaws in the market, sitting flat on the ground, surrounded by their wares, she held in special contempt. "I holds myse'f _clair_ 'bove a Injun," she boasted. "Dee ain't look jinnywine ter me. Dee ain't nuther white folks nur niggers, nair one. Sett'n' deeselves up fur go-betweens, an' sellin' sech grass-greens as we lef' berhindt us growin' in de wilderness!" But one unfailing source of pleasure to mammy was the little chicken, "Blink," who, she declared, "named 'isse'f Blink de day he blinked at me so cunnin' out'n de shell. Blink 'ain't said nothin' wid 'is mouf," she continued, eying him proudly, "'caze he know eye-speech set on a chicken a heap better'n human words, mo' inspecial on a yo'ng half-hatched chicken like Blink was dat day, cramped wid de egg-shell behime an' de morgans starin' 'im in de face befo', an' not knowin' how he gwine come out'n his trouble. He des kep' silence, an' wink all 'is argimints, an' 'e wink to the p'int, too!" In spite of his unique entrance into the world and his precarious journey, Blink was a vigorous young chicken, with what mammy was pleased to call "a good proud step an' knowin' eyes." Three months passed. The long, dull summer was approaching, and yet Evelyn had found no regular employment. She had not been idle. Sewing for the market folk, decorating palmetto fans and Easter eggs, which mammy peddled in the big houses, she had earned small sums of money from time to time. In her enforced leisure she found opportunity for study, and her picturesque surroundings were as an open book.