CHAPTER II
The "Queen of the Waves"
Into the fourteen years of her life Gipsy had certainly managed to compress a greater variety of experiences than falls to the share of most girls of her age. She had been a traveller from her earliest babyhood, and was familiar with three continents. Her father was a mining engineer, and in the course of his profession was obliged to visit many out-of-the-way spots in various corners of the globe. As Gipsy was all he had left to remind him of her dead mother, he never could bear to be parted from her for long, and he would generally contrive to put her to school at some place within tolerably easy reach of the vicinity of his mining operations. In the holidays he would sometimes take her up to camp, and Gipsy had spent long delightful weeks in the hills, or the bush, sleeping under canvas, or in a log cabin or a covered wagon, and living the life of the birds and the rabbits as regards untrammelled freedom.
She had grown up a thorough little Colonial, self-dependent and resourceful, able to catch her own horse and saddle it, to ride barebacked on occasion, and to be prepared for the hundred and one accidents
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