Our relations, fortunately, were not long confined to the stares and gestures of our first acquaintanceship. Realizing that I desired to speak with her, and encouraged by finding that I already knew a few words of Pushtu, she set about to teach me her language; and every day, for half an hour or more, she transformed herself from the smiling friend into the solemn instructress, first teaching me the local term for every visible object, and then linking the words together to form simple sentences. As her tutorship was ably furthered by her tribesmen, it was not long before I had mastered a vocabulary of all the more common words; and since I amused myself during my spare hours by repeating these words mentally and combining them into phrases, not many days had passed before I could speak Pushtu at least as well as a five-year-old. And what a joy when at last I could converse! Merely to exchange the simplest ideas with my friend was delight enough! But all the while there had been questions that I had been burning to ask, and now one by one I could ask them! No longer would that lovely creature be nameless to me--she confided with a blush that she was called Yasma, and was the daughter of Abthar, the vine-grower. As for her people--they were the Ibandru, a tribe which from the beginning of time had inhabited the Valley of Sobul, tilling the land for its rich harvests but finding their chief joy in roving the mountainsides. But who her people were and whence they were descended Yasma could not tell me; she could only say that they possessed the valley undisputed, and had little intercourse with other tribes; and she related for me an ancient legend that the first of her people had been born of the nuptials of the south wind and the spring flowers, so that the spirit of the flowers and of the wind must breathe through the tribe forever.