Mattina stopped a moment to wipe her forehead with the back of her sleeve. It was only May and the hollows of the hills on the mainland opposite were still filled with the blue morning shadows, but she had just left the shady path, slippery with pine needles, for the stony ledge along the hillside, and it was hot already. There was not a ruffle on the water, even on the open sea beyond the strip of the Narrow Beach which joined the wooded part of the island to the village part. Mattina decided that she would put the child on her back in the afternoon and carry him to a little crescent-shaped beach of which she knew on the Monastery road,[2] and let him kick his little legs in the water. Kyra Sophoula had told her that sea water was good for him and would make his legs strong. Who would take the trouble to carry him to the sea-shore when she was away? And she was leaving him and the island and everyone she knew, the next day! This was how it happened. More than a year ago her father had died of general paralysis, which is what often happens to sponge-divers[3] when they stay too long down in deep water. Her mother had been ill long before her father had been brought home dying, from Tripoli in Barbary, and after his death she got worse and worse, and had died just before Easter. The only relations Mattina and little baby Zacharia had left were an uncle, their mother's brother, who was a baker in Athens, and Kyra Kanella here in Poros, the wife of old Yoryi the boatman; and she was not really their aunt, but only their mother's cousin, and had a great many children of her own. Mattina and Zacharia really had another uncle too, a younger brother of their father's, but he did not count; he had left for America on an emigrant ship when he was quite a youth, and only wrote letters home once or twice a year. Mattina remembered that when her father was away with the sponge-divers, Kyr Vangheli, the schoolmaster, would read these letters to her mother, and in them it was always written that her uncle Petro was so pleased in America that he did not mean to come back for many years. So the two orphans had stayed with Kyra Kanella at first, because there was nowhere else for them to stay, and now she was still going to keep Zacharia; he was such a little one, and as she told Yoryi her husband, what the babe ate, nobody could miss it; it was not more than a sparrow would eat. But Mattina was different; Mattina was a big strong girl of more than eleven years of age, and she was going to Athens to be a servant. It had all been arranged some time ago. Her mother had said to her:--