And her countenance, that was a sweet rose and jasmine garden--but always, I would have you remember, a garden that blossoms by the sea, with vistas of the bay down every alley of the roses, and gleams of blue water glinting behind the trellis of the jasmine, and the sea air slightly touching the colour of all the flowers. Have you not seen the flowers in that Italian picture that are flung round Venus as she rises from the sea! Even so a little paler than the brave inland flowers were the jasmine and roses in the garden of the countenance of this lovely girl. And her body? Can I tell you its secret? Ah, never: but as you leave the garden--pluck one tendril from the vine. * * * * * Her light, gracious, flowing beauty trans-ported the boy to the days he had read of, the days when the world was young. The chains of commerce and the shackles of class,--as it were, the last tatters of his black British clothes--fell from him. Looking at her, he smiled. She evidently took that smile as a greeting intended for her, for she seemed to wait for him to come down and to be in no hurry with her pails. "Good morning," she cried to him as he approached, in the honeyed and somewhat languorous speech of Alsander. "Good morning," said Norman. "May I help you with the water?" Alsandrian is an easy, simple, and sonorous language, and Norman had been learning it and talking it to himself ever since the tramp he met in the night had directed his thoughts and footsteps toward the country of Alsander, yet he was very shy at practising for the first time this newly-acquired tongue. "Ah, I thought you were a foreigner," said the girl, speaking with the strained simplicity and slight mispronunciation that we all of us employ for the benefit of strangers and infants. "What is your country and your home?" "England." "England? Why you are the first Englishman I have ever seen! How beautiful you are!" Norman smiled, unable, and indeed unwilling, to deprecate his personal appearance. "It is you who are beautiful," he said, slowly, labouring with the strange tongue, "Are they all like you in Alsander?" "Do you think it possible?" She drew herself up with such grace that Norman's arms twitched and ached. But he was rather in awe of her. "How bright your eyes are!" he said. "Are they? What colour do you think they are?" she asked, turning them full on him. "They are blue. I have never seen such blue eyes in my life before." "You are quite sure that they are not green?" Norman was not at all sure that they were not: they seemed to him to change colour like little bright clouds, and shone at that moment like a lustrous emerald. But he simply said that they were not green, as he could only make very simple phrases in the language of Alsander. "Are you going to stay long in this country?" inquired the girl. "I think I shall have to."