but he had clear, blue eyes that met one with a curious child-like gaze. He was barefooted and his thin cot[Pg 65]ton trousers and canvas jacket were spotlessly clean, though Grahame imagined he had made the latter out of a piece of old awning they had meant to throw away. [Pg 65] "You come from the Canaries, don't you, Miguel?" Grahame asked in Castilian. "It is not so hot there." "From San Sebastian, señor, where the trade-breeze blows and the date-palms grow. My house stands among the tuna-figs beside the mule-track to the mountains." "Then you have a house? Who takes care of it while you are away?" "My señora. She packs the tomatoes they send to England. It is hard work and one earns a peseta a day." "Then why did you leave her?" Grahame asked, for he knew that a peseta, which is equal to about twenty cents, will not buy much of the coarse maize-flour the Canary peasants live upon. "There came a great tempest, and when my three boats were wrecked something must be done. My sons were drawn for the navy; they had no money to send. For years, señor, I was captain of a schooner fishing bacalao on the African coast, and when I came home to catch tunny for the Italian factory things went very well. Then the gale swept down from the peaks one night and in the morning the boats were matchwood on the reef." "Ah!" said Grahame. He could sympathize, for he too had faced what at the time had seemed to be overwhelming disaster. "So you sailed to look for better fortune somewhere else? You hope to go back to San Sebastian some day?" [Pg 66]"If my saint is kind. But perhaps it is well that he is a very great angel, for fortune is not always found when one looks for it at sea." [Pg 66] There was no irony in Miguel's answer; his manner was quietly dignified. Indeed, though he had been taught nothing except rudimentary seamanship, he had the bearing of a fine gentleman. "Wages are good in English and American ships," Grahame resumed, feeling that he was guilty of impertinence. "Sometimes you are able to send the señora a few dollars?" "I send all but a little to buy clothes when I go where it is cold, and my señora buries the money to buy another boat if it is permitted that I return. Once or twice a year comes a letter,
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