One night, the night before getting into port, when the curiosity which always followed her with grief failed of her in the heightened hilarity of the smoking-room, where the last bets on the ship's run were making, it found her alone beside a little iron table, of those set in certain nooks outside the grill-room. There she sat with no one near, where the light from within fell palely upon her. The boon birds of prey, with whom she had been supping, had abandoned her, and she was supporting her cheek on the small hand of the arm that rested on the table. She leaned forward, and swayed with the swaying ship; the violets in her bolero-toque quivered with the vibrations of the machinery. She was asleep, poor Mother-Bird, and it would have been impossible not to wish her dreams were kind. XI THE AMIGO His name was really Perez Armando Aldeano, but in the end everybody called him the _amigo_, because that was the endearing term by which he saluted all the world. There was a time when the children called him "Span-yard" in their games, for he spoke no tongue but Spanish, and though he came from Ecuador, and was no more a Spaniard than they were English, he answered to the call of "Span-yard!" whenever he heard it. He came eagerly in the hope of fun, and all the more eagerly if there was a hope of mischief in the fun. Still, to discerning spirits, he was always the _amigo_, for, when he hailed you so, you could not help hailing him so again, and whatever mock he put upon you afterward, you were his secret and inalienable friend. The moment of my own acceptance in this quality came in the first hours of expansion following our getting to sea after long detention in the dock by fog. A small figure came flying down the dock with outspread arms, and a joyful cry of "Ah, _amigo_!" as if we were now meeting unexpectedly after a former intimacy in Bogotá; and the _amigo_ clasped me round the middle to his bosom, or more strictly speaking, his brow, which he plunged into my waistcoat. He was clad in a long black overcoat, and a boy's knee-pants, and under the peak of his cap twinkled the merriest black eyes that ever lighted up a smiling face of olive hue. Thereafter, he was more and more, with the thinness of his small black legs, and his habit of hopping up and down, and dancing threateningly about, with mischief latent in every motion, like a crow which in being tamed has acquired one of the worst traits of civilization. He began babbling and gurgling in Spanish, and took my hand for a stroll about the ship, and from that time we were, with certain crises of disaffection, firm allies.