face, but seemed to feast on its comeliness with the desire of a famished appetite for food.
"Call me mother again!" exclaimed the Quadroon. "You called me mother down yonder at the store, and my heart leaped to hear the word. Sit ye down, my darling, there in the light, where I can see your innocent face. How like you are to your father, my boy. You've got his own bold eyes, and broad shoulders, and large, strong hands. I could not be deceived. I knew you from the first. Tell me true; you guessed who I was. You would never have gone up to a stranger as you did to me!"
Slap-Jack looked completely mystified. Wisely reflecting, however, that if a woman be left uninterrupted she will never "belay," as he subsequently observed, "till she has payed-out the whole of her yarn," he took another pull at the rum-and-water, and held his peace.
"Look about you, boy," continued Célandine, "and mark the wild, mysterious retreat I have made myself, on your account alone. No other white man has ever entered the Obi-woman's hut. Not a negro in the island but shakes with fear when he approaches that low doorway; not one but leaves a gift behind when he departs. And now, chance has done for the Obi-woman that which all her perseverance and all her cunning has failed to effect. Influence I have always had amongst the blacks, for I am of their kindred, and they believe that I possess super-*natural powers. You need not smile, boy. I can sometimes foretell the future so far as it affects others, though blindly ignorant where it regards myself; just as a man reads his neighbour's face clearly, though he cannot see his own. All my influence I have devoted to the one great object of making money. For that, I left my sunny home to live years in the bleak, cold plains of France; for that, I sold myself in my old age to one whom I could not care for, even in my youth; for that I have been tampering of late with the most desperate and dangerous characters in the island; and money I only valued because, without it, I feared I could never find my boy. Listen, my darling, and learn how a mother's love outlives the fancy of youth, the devotion of womanhood, and the covetousness of old age. Look at me now, child. It is not so long since men have
