Ioulia D. Dragoume

With her black kerchief drawn forward over her face to protect her head from the sun, her back bent under a load of sticks, Mattina, Kyra1 Kanella’s niece, came stumbling down from the road that leads from the little spring, the “Vryssoula,” through the pine trees, over the bridge, past the old well, and into the village of Poros.

It was a big load for a little girl not much over eleven years old, but her aunt was going to bake, the day after next, and wanted the sticks to light her oven; so, as Mattina was leaving the island the next day to go to Athens in the steamer, there would be no one to get sticks for Kyra Kanella and bring them down to her.

It is true she had plenty of daughters of her own, but they did not like carrying sticks on their backs, or walking so far to find them, and Mattina did not mind. She liked being out on the hills and down by the sea, more than anything else. Of course she liked it still better when there was no heavy load of branches or thyme to carry, but if she had had to choose between staying indoors or in the narrow village streets, and being out with a load of sticks however big, she would always have chosen the load. So when her aunt wanted her to go, she never pulled a crooked face; besides it was only on the way back that she had the burden to carry; going, she was free to run as she liked among the trees, to see how far she could throw the pine cones, to swing herself on the low branches, for everyone knows that pine branches will carry almost any weight without breaking; and if her way took her by the sea-shore, she could balance herself on the edge of the big rocks, or kick off her clumsy shoes and let the water run over her bare legs. Of course she was not yet old enough to wear stockings.

Sometimes, when she had no wood to fetch, she would take her little brother Zacharia with her; but he was only two years old and as he soon got tired of walking, it was not possible to carry him and the load of sticks as well. When he had been quite tiny and had lain quiet in his “naka,” the leathern hammock-cradle that is slung over one shoulder, it was easy to manage him, but he was too big now, so he stayed in the house, on the other side of the dark arch, with their aunt and all the cousins, or tumbled about the market square, and played with the little kids which were tethered round the old marble fountain.

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-divers³ 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:—

“When I am dead, you must go to Athens, and your uncle Anastasi there, and his wife, who is a good woman, will find a house in which you may serve and earn money. Afterwards when you can, you will come back to Poros and take care of Zacharia; he is not a strong child; how should he be, the unfortunate one! But you are a strong girl and you must be a good sister and look after him.”

She had said this the night before she died, when for a moment they were alone in the house, and when her eyes looked so big.

There was a tiny bit of land which had belonged to the children’s father, and which was theirs now, but it had given nothing that year; the crop of olives had been very poor indeed, the rains had come out of season, and the wind had blown every single almond off the trees; so that even the poor bits of clothes that Mattina was to take with her to town in her bundle had been cut down from some old things of her mother’s, and Kyra Sophoula who was a neighbour, had taken them to her house to stitch them.

By this time to-morrow, thought Mattina, who had got down to the Narrow Beach and was passing before the open gates of the Naval School,⁴ it would be nearly time for the steamer to leave; her uncle would take her in his boat and she would climb up the little ladder at the side of the steamer up to the deck. She herself, she, Mattina, would be one of those people whom she had so often watched from the shore, one of those who were going away to strange parts, who were leaving the island.

She stopped to shift her load of branches higher on her back, and a sailor who was standing by the gates took a step forward and held it up for her while she took a firmer grasp of the thin rope which kept it together.

“God give you many years,” she said to him, looking down. She did not like speaking to strangers, but she remembered what her mother always used to say to anyone who helped her, and since she was alone now it was for her to say it.

The man laughed.

“The load is bigger than the maid who bears it,” he said; then looking down at her curiously, “Whose are you?”

“I am Aristoteli Dorri’s.”

“What does he do?”

“He was a sponge-diver, but he died last year.”

“Bah! The unfortunate one! And you carry wood for your mother’s oven, eh?”

“My mother died also on the Thursday of the Great Week.”⁵

“Bah! The poor child! Here!” he cried, as Mattina was starting off again, “stop a moment!” and from the bottom of his pocket, he pulled out a little twist of pink muslin into which were tied five or six sugared almonds.

“Take these! They are from a christening, … you can eat them on the way.”

Mattina had no pocket, but after she had thanked the sailor, she tied the almonds into one corner of her kerchief, and trudged on.

When she reached the first houses of the village, she turned away from the sea and began climbing up a steep little street, threading her way between the small houses, disturbing flocks of gray and white pigeons who fluttered up and settled on the ledges of the low terraces, between pitchers of water and pots of sweet basil. She stepped carefully over the ropes of tethered goats, passing by the open doors of the big church, and stopping for a moment to admire a length of pink and white cotton stuff which hung outside Kyr Nicola’s shop. If only, she thought, her new dress might have been made of that! But the brown dress which her mother used to wear on holidays, before her father died, was still quite good, and it would have been a sin to waste it; Kyra Sophoula had said so. Moreover she had made it too wide for Mattina, and with three tucks in it, so that it might last her for some time to come.

Before one arrived at Yoryi’s house, there was a whole street of low broad steps which Mattina descended slowly one by one, for her back was beginning to ache. When she reached the little blue-washed house she dumped down her load of sticks beside the oven in the courtyard with a great sigh of relief.

She found Zacharia whimpering before a half-eaten “koulouri”—a sort of doughnut with a hole in the middle—which someone had amused himself by tying to a nail in the wall, so that it dangled just out of reach of the child’s little arms.

“’Attina! ’Attina!” he cried as soon as he saw her; “My koulou’i! My koulou’i!”

She broke the string violently, and thrust the half-eaten koulouri into the child’s outstretched hands, then turning angrily to three big girls who were seated laughing, on the wooden steps leading to the flat roof, she cried out:—

“What has the child done to you that you are forever tormenting him? A bad year to you!”

But they only laughed the louder, and one of them called out:—

“Drink a little vinegar, it will calm your rage!”

Mattina did not answer; she shouldered the water pitcher, took Zacharia by the hand, and went out again, out through the dark arch to the Market Square for water.

“’Attina!” and there was still a little sob in poor Zacharia’s voice.

“Yes, my little bird.”

“My koulou’i is nearly finished.”

“Eat it slowly then,” advised the big sister. “And if you only knew what a good thing I have for you to-morrow!”

But to-morrow meant nothing to Zacharia.

“What, ’Attina? What? Give it to me!”

“Not now. To-morrow. Come then! Come and see all the little boats!”

When they reached the square, Mattina sat down to rest for a moment on the deep stone trough built round the fountain under the old eucalyptus tree. Most of the women had already filled their red earthen pitchers and were carrying them away on their shoulders.

Only one old woman was still leaning against the trunk of the tree, waiting for her pitcher to fill itself. As she saw Mattina she stepped forward.

“It is well I find you. Tell your aunt that the clothes are finished. She can send you to take them.”

“I will tell it to her.”

“It is to-morrow you leave?”

“Yes, it is to-morrow.”

“And who takes you?”

“I go with Yanni, the messenger.”

“Listen, Mattina,” said the old woman, “I have stitched you a pocket into the brown frock. In the town it is not like here; sometimes you may have some money, or someone may send you a letter; you must have somewhere to put things.”

Mattina’s eyes brightened.

“A pocket!” she exclaimed, “like the big maids have!”

“You are well nigh a big maid now!”

The word pocket reminded Mattina of her sugared almonds.

“Kyra Sophoula,” she begged, “see, I have some sweets here. A sailor gave them to me, he said they were from a christening. Take them, you, and hide them away, and to-morrow after I go, take this little one to your house for a while, and give them to him. He cries when I leave him; and the others at the house, they torment him always. Do this for me, and may your children live to you!”

The old woman took the twist of muslin and put it into her apron pocket.

“Surely, I will, my daughter, surely I will.” Then she lifted her pitcher which had filled, gurgled, and overflowed, set it carefully on the ledge, and turned to Zacharia who was struggling for what remained of his koulouri, with a woolly black puppy.

“Come here, you little one!”

MATTINA·SAT·DOWN·

MATTINA·SAT·DOWN·

Kyra Sophoula was a funny old woman, as brown and as wrinkled as a quince that has been hung up too long, but children never ran away from her, even the tiny ones. Zacharia successfully rescued the last remnant of the koulouri from the puppy’s teeth, and came, looking up at her with round black baby eyes.

“If a good little boy who does not cry … a golden little boy, comes with me to my house to-morrow, I shall have … two sugar comfits, and a whole dried fig to give him! And if this golden little child never cries at all, there will be some more comfits the next day! I wonder if I shall find a good little boy, like that?”

Zacharia rubbed his black curls confidingly against the old woman’s skirts, and murmured:—

“Me!”

“Ah, we shall see fine things, that golden boy and I!” then turning to Mattina:—

“Tell me; your uncle Anastasi and his wife, have they found a good house in which you may serve?”

“Not yet; my uncle sent a letter to say that it would be better if I did not go till September, because there are more people who change servants at that time, but my uncle Yoryi here, he says that I must go to my uncle Anastasi’s now at once, and let them find a house for me to serve, when they can. He says he will keep the little one, but that I am a big girl, and that he has fed me long enough. It is true,” she added gravely, “that my hunger is great.”

Kyra Sophoula nodded her head.

“Yoryi is a poor man,” she said, “also, he has daughters to marry.”

“Is it far to Athens?” asked Mattina.

“Myself—I have never been there, but Metro has told me that one does not reach the town till long after noon.”

“Kyra Sophoula, do you think that after some time, when I earn money and can pay the fare on the steamer myself, that where I serve they will let me return for a few days to see if the little one be well?”

The old woman shrugged her shoulders.

“Do I know?”

“But if I tell them how little he is, and that we have no mother?”

“Listen, my daughter!” said Kyra Sophoula, as both she and Mattina shouldered their pitchers and turned towards the dark arch, Zacharia pattering behind them on little bare brown feet, “listen! there is one thing that you must put well into your head, that in the town it is not like here on the island, where everyone knows you and who your father and mother were. I know, because Andriana served, and Calliope served, and my Maroussa served also for a time. In the town when they take you as a servant and pay you a wage for serving, it is work that they want from you, as much as they can get. They do not know you, nor do they mind whether you like to work, nor whether you are well or ill, as long as your legs will hold you; neither do they care whether your heart be glad or troubled. But you, you must remember always that your father was a good man, and that your mother was a hard-working housewife who always kept her floors well scrubbed, and kneaded her own bread, and for whom all had a good word; and you must do the work that they give you, and not be thinking all day long of when you can leave it. As for the child, be easy! Kyra Kanella has not a bad heart, and I will see him often, and perhaps some time when the schoolmaster has leisure I will ask him to send you a letter. But you, be a good girl in the town, and mind well that you never touch aught without it be given to you, even if you have to go hungry, for as they say, ‘Better to lose your eye than your good name.’ ”

It was a forlorn little figure that knelt on a bench of the out-going steamer next morning. A little figure clad for the journey in a short outgrown print frock, with an old gray jacket which had once belonged to her aunt, tightly buttoned over it.

Mattina was looking with wide open eyes at all the familiar landmarks as they seemed to glide past her; at the big clock tower of the Naval School with its waving flag, at the little coffee-house of the White Cat down on the shore, at the Red House on the hill, at the Garden on the mainland where she had often been with her mother to help in the picking of the lemons, at the white blur far away in the hills, which was the village of Damala. But when the steamer turned round the corner by the lighthouse and Poros was hidden from her sight, she twisted herself round and sat down on the bench, her back huddled up like an old woman’s, and her eyes fixed on the deck.

When the steamer stopped at Methana,⁶ she stood up and watched the shore, but it already seemed strange and foreign to her; the gray rocks, bare of pine trees, the line of bathing houses, the bright yellow colour of the water close to the land, which someone said came from the sulphur of the baths, the big white hotel, the strange boatmen rowing backwards and forwards; all was new and in some curious way terrifying. The boatmen shouting to each other seemed to be shouting at her, and the sun shining on the sea made so many glittering little pinpricks of light that she closed her eyes not to see them.

After Methana, the steamer began to move a great deal more than it had done at first, and she went back to her bench for fear she should fall. For a short time she was interested in a little toddling boy belonging to a woman who seemed asleep, her kerchief shadowing the upper part of her face. The boy was not at all like Zacharia, being much fatter, and with hair which was almost yellow, but he took bites out of his koulouri all round, just as Zacharia did. Mattina made timid advances to him, but he ran away from her to a white-bearded old priest on the next bench, and began to wipe his wet little mouth and hands, all over koulouri crumbs, on the black robes. Mattina expected that the old priest would be angry, but he only smiled and patted the little yellow head.

While she watched them, the priest’s black figure seemed to mount up, up, up, against the glittering sea, and then to sink down again as though it were never coming up. It hurt her to look at it, and she folded her arms on the back of the bench and laid her head on them. Perhaps she was going to sleep; she had been up very early that morning; but she did not feel at all sleepy, only very hot and miserable. She began to long for a drink of water; perhaps she was thirsty, but she felt afraid to move. Her uncle Yoryi when he had put her on board had said, “Do not leave your seat, or someone may take it.”

The woman with the child had a pitcher with her; it stood on the deck beside a big bundle and a little shining green trunk, studded with brass nails; and the mouth of the pitcher was stopped by a bunch of myrtle leaves. Mattina ventured to nudge the woman’s elbow.

“Kyra,” she asked, “may I drink from your ‘stamna’?”

The woman opened her eyes with a little groan and, thrusting her arm into an opening of the big bundle, pulled out a short thick tumbler and handed it to her. Mattina poured some water into it and drank, but somehow it tasted bitter, not like Poros water. She put the tumbler back without even wiping it, and sank back on her bench.

How hot it was, and how miserable she felt!

She bent forward and hid her head in her arms.

It was so, that Yanni the messenger found her a little later when they were outside Ægina.⁷

“Bah!” he exclaimed, pulling her head back, “what a colour is this? You are as yellow as a Good Friday candle! The sea has spoiled you, I see! Your head is giddy. Here, lie down! Put your head back on this bundle! You will be better so.”

Mattina made no resistance, but as she fell back she murmured:—

“It is not my head, it is my stomach which is giddy.”

It went on getting so much giddier that when at last they arrived at PirÆus⁸ Yanni had to carry her down the side of the steamer to the little boat and when she was lifted out on the quay she could scarcely stand. However, the fresh air and the walk to the railway station revived her.

The railway carriage in which they traveled up to Athens was very crowded, and the fat woman sitting next to Mattina seemed very cross.

“Why do they not put more carriages?” she enquired of no one in particular. “We are jammed as flat here as squashed mosquitoes.” But to Mattina who had never even ridden in a cart in her life, it was wonderful. The swift rushing, the bump, bump of the carriages, the man with a gold band on his cap who looked at the tickets and gave them back again, and who said to Yanni while he was searching for theirs, “Come, now; hurry! The new day will dawn by the time you find it!” … the stopping at Phalerum⁹ and at the Theseum¹⁰ before they got out at the Monastiraki¹¹ Station.

Then there was the street-car; the rush through narrow streets at first, and then through wider and wider ones, till they stopped at a wonderful big square full of people. In all her eleven years, Mattina had never imagined so many men and women and children and horses and carriages together. The square seemed to her surrounded by palaces, till Yanni showed her the one in which the King lived, and over which the flag was flying.

Then the car went on again, and the streets got narrower again, and at last Yanni got off the little platform at the back of the car and Mattina scrambled after him.

“Come!” he said, “your uncle’s oven is quite close by here and I have work to do after I leave you.”

Up one narrow steep street, a turn to the left, along a still narrower street almost like a Poros one but far, far dustier, and they came to a stop before a small baker’s shop. On the open slab of the window were quantities of ring-shaped loaves, and heaped up piles of oven-cakes covered with squares of pink muslin. A man was counting some smaller loaves in the dimness of the back of the shop, and a tidy stout woman in a big blue apron was standing at the door.

“Good day to you,” said Yanni, “I bring you your niece from Poros.”

“Bah!” exclaimed the woman, “has she come to-day? I thought they said on Saturday.”

Yanni shrugged his shoulders.

“Do I know what they said? Yoryi gave her to me this morning, to bring straight to you. What I am told, I do.”

“It does not matter,” said the woman quickly, “it does not matter at all. Welcome, my girl! Come in! Come in!” Then turning towards the back of the shop, “Anastasi, your niece has arrived!”

Her husband started, left his loaves and came forward. He was a thin man with stooping shoulders, and a look in his eyes which reminded Mattina of her mother and made a lump come into her throat so that she could scarcely answer when he spoke to her.

“Welcome, my maid, for your mother’s sake,” he said. “When I saw you in Poros you were so high only; now you have grown a big maid! And Kanella, and Yoryi, and their children, and the little one, are they well? How did you leave them?”

“They are well,” stammered Mattina, “they salute you.”

Her uncle Anastasi turned to his wife:—

“Demetroula,” he said, “take the child in; she will be hungry; look to her while I pay Yanni for his trouble.”

Her aunt took Mattina into a little room which opened on the courtyard, and taking her bundle from her, pushed it under a big bed in the corner. Mattina had never seen her before. The poor do not take journeys for pleasure, or for the sake of visiting their relations. But her new aunt had a kind round face and pretty shiny brown hair which one could see quite well, as she did not wear a kerchief; and when she spoke she smiled very often, so that Mattina did not feel shy with her.

“Come here to the window,” she said, “and let me look better at you. Ah, yes; it is your poor father that your face brings back to one, not your mother at all. Now, my girl,” and she let her hand fall on Mattina’s shoulder as she spoke, “let us say things clearly! You did well to come, and it is with joy that your uncle and I would keep you to live here with us. How should it not be so, since God has given us no children? A piece of bread and a mattress there would always be for you. But we are poor people, and, … that would be all; so it would be a sin to keep you with us. It is myself I injure when I say this, for you would be a great help to me in the house. But that you should work, and get only your bread for it!—no, that must not be! We have spoken with your uncle, and he thinks as I do. What do you say also? Do you not wish to earn money?”

“Yes, my aunt.”

“Well, then, see what good luck you have! We thought that not till September could a house be found, but only yesterday the boy from the grocer’s round the street, told me that his brother who works for a butcher in the PirÆus Road, knows a house where they are looking for a serving maid. It is a good house, he says, where they buy meat every day; there are only two small children, and the master has a shop of his own in the big street of shops. The lady, he said, prefers a girl from the islands who has not as yet served, and she will give ten drachmƹ² a month and dress her. So that you will have naught to spend and we can put all your money in the People’s Bank for you. Will not that be well?”

“Yes, my aunt.”

“Good!” said Kyra Demetroula, “I will take you there to-morrow early, to speak with the lady. Now come and eat! There is plenty left of the artichoke stew, and I will warm it up for you.”

So, early the next morning, after the boy from the grocer’s round the street had given the necessary directions, they found themselves in the neighbourhood of the PirÆus Road, and Mattina toiled after her aunt, up narrow dusty streets in search of the house where a new serving maid was wanted.

She was very hot and uncomfortable, for her aunt had insisted on her wearing her new brown frock with the pocket in it, as being by far the best in her bundle. This it certainly was, but also very thick and warm and the heat was coming fast that year. Though the Saint’s day of St. Constantine and St. Helen was till some time off, the May wreaths—which are hung over all balconies or front doors of houses in Athens on the first day of May and left hanging there until replaced by the fresh wreath, the following year—were already hanging withered and yellow from the house doors and balconies. After many wrong turnings, and many inquiries at neighbouring grocers’ and bakers’ shops, the aunt and the niece stopped before the wide open door of a house in a street behind the PirÆus Road. The narrow entry certainly looked as if it were a long time since the last serving maid had scrubbed it. A woman with a long face and a fat body was standing just inside with a packet of macaroni in her hands.

“What do you want?” she called out sharply.

Kyra Demetroula advanced a step.

“Good day to you, Kyria,” and as she said it she pushed Mattina a little forward. “They told us that you wanted a girl to serve you, and because we have heard much good of your house, I have brought you my niece.”

“Your niece! What? That child! Much work she can do! Who sent you?”

“It was the butcher in the big road here, who told us that ….”

“Come inside! Let me see her better! I should never think of such a small maid but that it is a bad season for servants, and that I have been three days without one.” Then turning to Mattina, “How old are you?”

Now no one had ever thought of telling Mattina her age; she was a big girl, since her mother had often trusted her of late to make the bread, and that was all she knew about it. She looked up at the woman and noticed that she had little black eyes like currants, a nose that went in before it came out, and a mouth that had no lips; then she quietly answered her question by another one.

“How should I know my years?”

Her aunt interposed hurriedly:—

“She must be fourteen, Kyria.”

“Fourteen! Vegetable marrows! She is not even twelve! From where is she?”

“From Poros.”

“Poros! I have had many serving-maids from Andros, and some from Tenos, and one came from Crete, but from Poros … h’m ….”

“It is a beautiful island!” returned Mattina, flushing angrily that anyone should “H’m” at her island. “It has hills and trees down to the sea, and lemon woods, and big fig trees, and the Sleeper, such a high mountain as you never saw, and the sea all round everywhere.”

“How should the sea not be round everywhere on an island? Is the girl an idiot?” and the woman looked at Kyra Demetroula.

“She has but just come from there,” ventured the latter. “Have sympathy with her; she has not yet learned town speech.”

The woman sniffed.

“Well, what can you do?”

“I can do much.”

“What?”

“I can scrub boards till they are quite white, I can wash clothes, I can knead three okes¹³ of dough at a time, I can weave yarn at the loom and I can row in a big boat with both oars together.”

The woman laughed.

“Truly, that will be very useful here! You can row the master to the shop, every morning.”

Mattina looked at her pityingly; she had never before heard people say things that meant something else.

“That is foolish talk, …” she began, but her aunt pushed her aside hurriedly:—

“She is very strong, Kyria; when her poor mother, God rest her soul, lay for three months on her mattress, Mattina here kept all the house clean and looked after her little brother as well. Take her, and you will never repent it.”

Just at that moment a hand organ stopped outside in the street, and began to play the valse from the Dollar Princess. Mattina, with never a look at the two women, who went on talking, ran out of the passage to the open street door. All the music she had ever heard in her life had been the harsh tuneless tunes which men sang sometimes in Poros at the tavern after they had been drinking, or at best the little folk songs which the officers of the Naval School sang to the accompaniment of a guitar on moonlight nights. This beautiful swinging tune coming out of the tall box when the man turned a handle, was quite new, and she stood there listening with wide open eyes, her arms hanging loosely on either side of her, and her lips apart. So intent was she that at first she did not hear her aunt calling her.

“Mattina! Mattina! Where has the child gone? Mattina! Mattina, I tell you! Do you not hear?”

“I hear,” she answered at last, retracing her steps reluctantly.

“Come, my child; all is arranged. This good Kyria says she will take you and teach you many things. She gives only eight drachmÆ a month now, because she wanted a bigger girl. I do not know, that is to say, whether your uncle will like you to come for so little, but ….”

“Of course,” put in the fat woman, “she will have her shoes, a woolen dress in the winter, two print ones in summer, and her present at New Year.”

As she walked back to the baker’s shop with her aunt, Mattina was busy thinking. The dresses did not interest her very much, though she hoped that one of them might be a pink one, but the present at New Year, that was another thing! She knew all about presents, though she had never received one herself. When Panouria, old Lenio’s Panouria, had been married to Theophani the shoemaker, did not her father make her a present of a big mirror with a broad gold frame all round it? This mirror had been brought from PirÆus, and Mattina had seen the men taking it carefully out of its wooden case, and had heard the neighbours who were standing around, saying that it was a present to Panouria from her father. Did not Stavro, the son of Pappa Thanassi, send a present to his mother from America, a big rocking chair all covered with red velvet? Did not the little ladies from the Red House on the hill once give a present to Antigone, who lived in the small house near their gate, when she was so ill, a wonderful doll with yellow hair, that opened and shut its eyes like a real Christian? Yes, she knew all about presents! They were beautiful things which were not really necessary to every-day life, but which people who had much money gave you to make your heart joyful. Later on, when her aunt related to her uncle all that the new Kyria had said, adding:—

“I could not get more from her than eight drachmÆ for the child; she looks of the kind that counts every lepton,”¹⁴ Mattina had said:—

“But there will also be a present at New Year!”

And her aunt had replied in a funny voice,—“Oh, yes! And a fine present that will be I am sure!”

Then Mattina’s joy was complete. Not only was she to have a present, but her aunt had said she was sure it would be a fine one; and surely she knew all about town ways, and the kind of presents that are given there. Mattina, you see, was not used to people who said one thing, in fun, and meant another. She often thought of that present, and of what she would like it to be, if she might choose. And certainly the poor maid required the comfort of this thought in the long dreary days which followed the one when she had been left with her bundle at the house where she was to serve.

It was not the hard work she minded. She had had plenty of that in Poros; scrubbing, weaving, bread-making which makes the arms so tired, carrying heavy burdens till one’s back feels as if it would break in two; all this she knew, but it had been at home in her own island in Poros, surrounded by people who knew her and had known her father and mother, and who had a good word for her now and then. And when work was over, she had been free to run wild among the pines and on the sea-shore. But work in town never seemed to be over.

Her mother and Kyra Sophoula had often called her a good little worker, and strong and quick, but in Athens her mistress was always telling her she had never seen such a clumsy child in her life. Perhaps she may have been awkward at first, and did break a plate or two, when it came to washing up basins full of greasy pans, and platters, and plates, and knives, and forks all muddled up together. But necessity compelling,—and the difficulty of dodging a blow on the head, when one’s arms are dipped in soap-suds, and one is standing on a shaky stool,—made her learn pretty fast how to be careful. Also, at home, Zacharia had long ago pattered after her on his little bare feet, but here in Athens, “Bebeko” the smaller of her mistress’s two boys who was nearly a year older, always cried to be carried when she took them out, and Mattina found that to carry a fat, squirming, cross boy of three, and have another of five hanging heavily on her arm or skirts, was far worse than the heaviest load of sticks she had ever borne.

May melted into June, and June into July, and the days grew hotter and hotter, and longer and longer, and the longer they grew the more time there was for work, and the less for sleep. Mattina’s mattress was in a little dark room half way up the stairs, and as soon as it was light in the mornings, her mistress would pound on the floor above, with a walking stick which she kept beside her bed, for the little maid to get up, sweep the rooms, brush the master’s clothes, and prepare his coffee for him before he went to his shop; and in June and July it is light very early indeed.

Later on in the morning, Mattina used to bring out a big table cover to shake outside the front door, and her gesture as she shook it, had anyone cared to watch her, was strong, decided and thorough. One could see that she would grow into a strong capable woman; that she would know how to lift things, how to handle them, how to fold them; that whatever she touched would be the better for her touching. And as she shook the dust out, while the hot sun beat down upon her head, she would close her eyes and try to fancy that the whistle of the distant Kiphissia¹⁵ train was the whistle of the morning steamer coming into the bay of Poros and that she need only open her eyes to see the glittering blue water before her, and the fishing boats with the white and red sails gliding across it; but when she opened them she only saw potato peels and pieces of old lettuce floating forlornly on the dirty stream of water beside the sidewalk. This stream was here because there was a public tap round the corner of the street, and the slatternly women who went there for water, the heels of their loose down-trodden slippers tap-tapping on the pavement as they walked, generally neglected to close it.

One evening, when the food for supper was not enough, Mattina’s mistress sent her out to the grocer’s in the PirÆus Road to buy some sardines; and while she was waiting to be served, she noticed four men sitting outside the shop around a little table. One of the men was strumming a guitar, and suddenly very softly they began to sing all together. They sang the “tsopanoulo,” that song of the “shepherd boy” which Mattina had so often heard the young officers singing as they rowed themselves about the bay on moonlit nights “at home.”

She leaned against the door of the shop and closed her eyes very tight.

“I will not look,” she thought, “I will only listen, and it will be for a little as if I were back in my island.”

And because there is nothing like music to remind one of places, unless it be scent, a picture arose behind her closed eyelids, of the quiet dark water, of the broad golden path of the moon, and of the little boat that glided through the gold; and as she watched the picture, two tears trickled from the eyes that were shut, and ran down her cheeks.

“Now, my girl,” said a voice beside her suddenly, “here are your sardines!” and a greasy paper was thrust into her hand.

Oh, how it hurt, to have to open her eyes, to take what was given to her, to pay her lepta, and to stumble out half dazed into the street.

Once there, she thought for a moment that she was still dreaming, for on the side walk, talking to a man in a straw hat, was an old sea captain in the cross-over vest and the baggy blue breeches such as she had seen hundreds of times on the quay at home.

“The wind has turned a little chilly,” the man in the straw hat was saying, “and there are many clouds in the sky. It will rain I think before night.”

Mattina instinctively raised her eyes to the west, and half unconsciously repeated what she had so often heard her father say:—

then pointing with her finger where the sky was still of a dusky pink, she said, “There are no clouds there.”

The captain turned suddenly, and looked at the odd little figure in her white festooned apron that hung far below her frock, with her short black plaits tied round her head.

“That is what we say in my country.” Then stooping a little. “From where are you? Are you from Poros, perhaps?”

Mattina gulped down a lump in her throat.

“Yes, I am from Poros.”

“Whose are you?”

“Aristoteli Dorri’s, the sponge diver’s.”

“Ah, yes! The poor one! I heard that he had died. And did your mother send you here?”

“My mother wept much after my father died, and then she coughed more than she did before, and then she got worse, and then she died.” And Mattina turned her back on the men, and twisted and untwisted the end of the paper in which the sardines were wrapped.

“Now, lately?” asked the captain.

“It was on the Thursday of the Great Week.”

“Well! Well! Life to you! It is a dirty world! With whom do you live now?”

“I serve at a house.”

“You have no one in Athens?”

“I have my uncle Anastasi the baker, and my Aunt Demetroula, but they live far from here near the Kolonaki.”¹⁶

“Ah, Anastasi Mazelli, your mother’s brother; I know him. A good man! When you see him give him my salutations. Say they are from Capetan Thanassi Nika of Poros, and he will know.”

“I will say it to him,” answered Mattina.

“Well, the good hour be with you, little compatriot!”

Mattina walked back to the house very slowly, with her eyes fixed on the pavement. The talk about her people, the sound of a Poros voice, had brought back so much to her! She thought of the good times when her “babba,” as she called her father, came home from a long absence with the sponge-divers—filling the room with his laugh, the little bare clean room with the big pot of sweet basil on the window seat—telling all that had happened: how this one had not been able to stay so long under water, and that one, the lazy dog, had pretended to be ill, and how the captain had called on him again and again—“Come then, you, Aristoteli! I would rather work with you alone than with ten others; you are always ready to get your head into the helmet.” And Mattina, seated on his knees, would clap her hands with pride, crying, “My Babba is always ready!” and her mother cooking a hot dinner in honor of the return, would shake her head and mutter, “Too ready; too ready,” but would smile at them the next moment, as she emptied the stew from the pan to the dish and told them to get their plates ready. After her father had died, the house was never so bright again; there was no laughing in it. Still, she had had her mother then, and it was she whom Mattina missed most, for she had never been away from her.

All the next day Mattina thought of the old captain, and in the afternoon she told Antigone how she had met a compatriot, and what he had said to her. This was when they sat side by side on the steps of their “houses” to take the cool of the evening, after their mistresses had gone out.

Antigone was the serving maid of the next house, which was kept by a widow who let the rooms out to different lodgers. This maid was much older than Mattina and puffed out her hair at the sides, besides wearing a hat with pink flowers on it when she went out on Sundays.

“Your heart seems to hold very much to that island of yours!” she was saying. “What is there different in it to other places?”

Mattina tried to tell her; but talking about Poros was like relating a dream which has seemed so long and which one still feels so full and varied, but which somehow can only be told in the fewest and barest of words.

“Is that all?” exclaimed Antigone, “just trees, and rocks, and sea, and fisher folk, and boatmen? It would say nothing to me! But each one to his taste. Why do you not go back to it and work there?”

“I cannot; each one works for himself on the island; there are no houses in which to serve, there is no money to earn.”

Antigone shrugged her shoulders.

“Truly it is much money you are earning here! Eight drachmÆ a month, and your shoes,” with a contemptuous glance at Mattina’s feet, “all worn out!”

“There are only three holes,” said Mattina gravely, “and she,” with a backward jerk of her thumb, “said I should have new ones next week.”

Antigone laughed.

“You will get them on the week that has no Saturday.”

“And at New Year,” went on Mattina, “she will give me a present!”

“Give you a present! She! Your Kyria! You have many loaves to eat, my poor one, before that day dawns!”

“But she said so.”

“She said and she will unsay!”

“But my aunt heard it, too, and she told my uncle it would be a fine one.”

“Your aunt does not know her, and I have lived next door to her it is three years now, and I have known all her servants. Some people give presents, yes, they have good hearts; but your mistress would never give a thing belonging to her, no, not even her fever! Now there is the ‘Madmazella’ who lives in the ground floor room at our house. She gives lessons all day long, and she has not much money, yet she often gives me things. When she came back from her country last time, she brought me a silk blouse ready sewn with little flowers all over it, and lace at the neck. And the other day she put her two hats into one paper box, and gave me the other one to keep my hat in, because it gets crushed in my trunk. And always with a good word in her mouth! So I too when she is ill, I run for her till I fall. She is going away again to her country, in a few days now, and she says that when she comes back she will bring me a new hat.”

But Mattina’s mind was running on her present.

“I do not want a silk blouse, nor a box for a hat, because,” she added as an afterthought, “I have no hat. But I should like very much if someone would give me a picture with a broad gold frame, which I saw in the window of a shop the other day when I took the children out. It was the picture of the sea, and there was a boat on it with a white sail, and you could see the sail in the water all long and wavy, as you do really, and if you touched the water you thought your finger would be wet. That is what I wish for.”

“A picture! And where would you hang it?”

Mattina thought for a moment.

“I do not know,” she said at last, “but it would be mine, and I could look at it every day.”

“You! with your seas, and your rocks, and your island!” exclaimed the older girl as she stooped to pick up her crochet work which had fallen off her knees. “Even if it were Paris, you could not make more fuss about it.”

“What is Paris?”

“Paris is the country from where Madmazella comes. She says it is a thousand times more beautiful than Athens.”

Mattina looked about her, at the women who sat chatting before the narrow doorways behind which were occasional glimpses of crowded courtyards and linen spread out to dry, at the dirty little trickle of water along the sidewalk with its accustomed burden of rotting lettuce leaves, at the children scrambling and shouting in the thick dust of the road, and sighed. She could not have told why she sighed, nor have put into words what she found so ugly about her, so she only said:—

“Perhaps it is better there than here.”

That Athens has beauties of its own, which people travel from distant lands to see, she knew not. Its charms were not for her. When she walked out with Taki and Bebeko, the pavements hurt her badly shod feet, and the glare of the tall white houses hurt her eyes. As for the beautiful Royal Gardens with their old trees and their shady paths, their pergolas, their palms, their orange trees and their sheets of violets, as for the Zappion¹⁷ from whose raised terrace one can see the columns of the old Temple of Jupiter, the Acropolis,¹⁸ the marble Stadium,¹⁹ and Phalerum and the sea, all of which together make what is perhaps the most beautiful view in all Europe, … she had never been there! Those were walks for the rich and well-born children whom she sometimes saw wheeled about in little carriages by foreign nurses who were dressed all in white with little black bonnets tied with white strings. How could she lug two heavy children so far? No, Athens for her was made up of hot narrow streets, of much noise and hard pavements.

The very next morning while she was sweeping out the passage, she saw Antigone in her best dress and her hat with the pink flowers, beckoning to her from outside the house.

“What is it?” exclaimed Mattina, “how is it you are dressed in your fine things in the morning? What is happening?”

“It is happening that I am going! That old screaming mistress of mine has sent me off!”

“But what did you do?”

“I only told her I was not a dog to be spoken to as she speaks to me, and she told me to go now at once! Well, it matters little to me; there is no lack of houses, and better than hers a thousand times! I am a poor girl without learning, but I should be ashamed to scream as she does when anger takes her. Why, you can hear her as far off as the square! Well, if she thinks I shall regret her and her screams, she deceives herself! See, I leave you the key of my trunk. I will send my brother for it this evening, if he can come so far; he lives at the Plaka²⁰ you know. And I will tell him to ask you for the key: I will have no pryings in my things. And Mattina ….”

“Yes?”

“Do me a favor and may you enjoy your life!”

“What shall I do?”

“Who knows when the old woman in there will get another girl to serve, and there is that poor Madmazella who is ill, and in bed again to-day, and not a soul to get her a glass of water! Go in you, once or twice, will you not? Her room is over there; it opens on the courtyard by a separate door, so you need not go near the rest of the house at all.”

“I will go,” said Mattina.

“I shall owe it you as a favor. Well, Addio—good-by—perhaps I shall see you again.”

“The good hour be with you!” said Mattina, and then ran back into the house, hearing her master calling her.

Later in the day, when her mistress had gone out for the afternoon, Mattina filled a glass with cold water and carried it carefully into the neighbouring courtyard. She found the ground floor room easily, and lifting the latch, stood hesitatingly in the doorway. Tapping at a door was unknown in Poros etiquette.

A young woman with a pale face and tumbled fair hair lay on the bed in a corner of the room.

She opened her eyes as the door creaked, and smiled at Mattina.

“What is it, little one? Whom do you want?”

“Antigone said …” and Mattina shifted from one foot to another, “that there was not a soul to get you a glass of water.”

The young woman raised herself on her elbow, and her fair hair fell about her shoulders.

“And so you came to bring me one! But what kindness! I accept with gratitude; but it is not water I want. Since the morning I have taken nothing, and I have a hollow there, which gives me still more pain in the head.”

Mattina looked puzzled; she did not know what a “hollow” was.

“Listen, little one: on the shelf of that cupboard there, there is a small box of chocolate; it is in powder all ready and my spirit lamp wants but a match to it. Bring then your glass of water; you see we do require it after all, pour it in the little pan, and the chocolate, so … stir it a little with the spoon, and we will wait till it bubbles. You can wait a little …. Yes? Is it not so?”

“I can wait; the Kyria is out.”

“Then pull that little table close to my bed. Ah! How it hurts my head! Scarcely can I open my eyes.”

“Close them,” said Mattina; “I will tell you when it boils.”

Deftly she pulled forward the little table, straightened the tumbled sheets, and closed the open shutters so that the hot afternoon sun should not pour on the bed. Then she stood by the spirit lamp, and watched the frothing mixture.

“It boils,” she announced at last.

The young woman opened her eyes.

“Ah, the glare is gone!” she said, “how well that is for my poor eyes. But you are a good fairy, my little one! Now bring the cup from that shelf …. No; bring two! There is plenty of chocolate, and I am quite sure you like it also.”

“I do not know,” said Mattina. “It smells good but I have never tasted it.”

“Never tasted chocolate! Oh, the poor little one! Quick! Bring a cup here, and bring also that box of biscuits from the lower shelf! I am sure you are hungry. Is it not so?”

“Yes,” assented Mattina, “I am always hungry. My mistress,” she added gravely, “says that I eat like a locust falling on young leaves.”

“Like a locust! But what a horror! It is a sign of good health to be hungry. Come then, my child, drink, and tell me if it be not excellent, my Paris chocolate?”

So Mattina tasted her first cup of French chocolate, and found it surpassingly good.

And the next day, and for three days after that, in the afternoons, when she might have sat down to rest on the doorstep, Mattina would lift the latch of the room in the courtyard, while “Madmazella” was out giving lessons, and sweep, and dust, and tidy, and put fresh water into the pretty vase with the flowers, and clean the trim little house shoes, and fill the spirit lamp.

But on the fifth day, a carriage came to the door of the next house, and the coachman went into the ground floor room and brought out a trunk, which he lifted to the box, and “Madmazella” came out also in a dark blue dress, with a gray veil tied over her hat, and a little bag in her hand, ready to go away to her own country.

Mattina stood outside on the pavement looking on, and there was a lump in her throat.

“Madmazella” got into the open one-horse carriage and beckoned to her.

“Come here, my little one! You have been of a goodness,—but of a goodness to me that I do not know how to thank you; I shall bring you a whole big box of chocolates from Paris when I return; and now take this very little present, and buy something as a souvenir of me! Is it not so?”

She smiled and waved her hand as the carriage drove off, and only when it was quite out of sight did Mattina look at what had been pressed into her hand. It was a crumpled five drachmÆ note and Mattina looked at it with awe. She wondered whether it would be enough to buy the picture with the boat, in case the New Year present should be something else. In the meanwhile where should she keep it?

Suddenly she thought of the pocket Kyra Sophoula had stitched into her brown dress. She ran up to the little dark room, half way up the stairs, reached down her bundle from the nail on which it hung, pulled out a much crumpled brown dress, shook it out, found the pocket, and placed the five drachmÆ note in it, pinning up the opening carefully for fear the note might fall out.

It had been agreed that Mattina should be allowed to go to see her uncle and aunt every other Sunday, in the afternoon. But it had happened lately that Sunday after Sunday her mistress had said, “I have to go out myself, a friend expects me,” or, “My head aches; I cannot be troubled with the children; you can go out another day.” But the “other day” never came. An older serving maid, or one who knew town ways better, would have asked for the outing on a week day; but Mattina did not know. She cried a little over her lost holiday and stayed in week after week, in the narrow street and the close rooms that always smelt of stale smoke.

It was a blazing hot Sunday morning in September, and the fifth since Mattina had last been out, when as she was sitting in the small kitchen listlessly peeling and slicing a pile of purple aubergines²¹ which seemed as though it would never lessen, someone shuffled along the street outside and stopped at the little window which was level with the pavement.

It was Kyra Polyxene, the old washerwoman who lived on the top floor of the next house, and who went out washing to nearly all the houses of the neighborhood. Mattina knew her quite well. She had been engaged two or three times to help for a day when the big monthly wash had been an extra heavy one. The brown old face and the gray hair made Mattina think a little of Kyra Sophoula when she looked at her, except that Kyra Polyxene was taller and stouter and wore no kerchief on her head.

She put her face close to the window bars and peered in.

“Good day, Mattina, what are you doing in there?”

Mattina let drop the slice she was holding, into the basin of cold water beside her, and came close to the window.

“Good day to you, Kyra Polyxene; I am cutting up aubergines to make a ‘moussaka.’ ”²²

“How is it you have so many aubergines?”

“We have people to-day for dinner. The Kyria’s sisters are coming, and Taki’s godfather also.”

“And your mistress does not help you?”

“She is upstairs dressing the children to take them to hear music in the square. When I first came here she showed me, but now I can make ‘moussaka’ all alone and it tastes as good as hers.” There was a certain pride in Mattina’s voice.

“Shall you go with them to the music?”

“I? No! There is this to finish, and the dining room to sweep, and the table to lay, and if the dinner be not ready at twelve, the master is angered.”

“And after they have eaten?”

“There will be all the plates to wash.”

“And then?”

“Do I know? There is always something.”

“Listen to me, my girl! Yesterday I washed at a house up at the Kolonaki, and they sent me for a loaf to your uncle’s oven, and he was saying that they had not seen you for many days; and he told me to tell you that you must go there this afternoon and that if your mistress makes difficulties, you are to tell her that if she keeps you always closed up, he, your uncle will come and take you away, and find another house for you.”

Mattina opened her eyes widely.

“Did he say so to you, Kyra Polyxene?”

“Just as I tell you, my daughter.”

Mattina wiped her hands on her apron and ran upstairs to her mistress’s bedroom. She found her struggling with Taki’s stiffly starched sailor collar, while Bebeko sitting on the unmade bed, with unbuttoned boots, was howling for his hat which had been placed out of his reach.

“How many more hours are you going to be, cleaning those aubergines, lazy one? How do you want me to dress two children and myself? Have I four hands do you think? Fasten the child’s boots and make him stop that crying.”

Mattina lifted the heavy screaming boy off the bed, and sat down on the floor with him.

“Why does Bebeko want his hat?” she whispered. “Now in a minute after I have fastened his little boots for him, I shall tie it on his head and he will go with Mamma and Babba and Taki, and hear the pretty music; and when he comes back ….” The child stopped crying and looked at her, “and when he comes back, if he be a good child, I shall have such a beautiful boat ready for him, cut out of an aubergine! It will have two seats and a helm.”

“And a mast. Will it have a mast too, Mattina?”

“And a mast, of course.”

“And a sail?”

“No,” said Mattina seriously, looking out of the window, “it will not want a sail, there is no wind to-day.”

“But I want it to have a sail,” persisted the child.

“I have no rag for a sail,” said Mattina. “Bebeko must ask his Mamma for some when the boat is ready.”

When both children were dressed, there was a search for the Kyria’s parasol which was nowhere to be found. At first she accused Mattina of having broken it and hidden the pieces, and at last remembered that she had left it at her sister’s house. Then her keys were mislaid, looked for in all sorts of places, and discovered at last under her pillow. Lastly she searched angrily for a twenty-five drachmÆ note, which she declared she had folded up and placed under her gloves in the early morning.

“I put it there on purpose to change it when I went out, and buy ‘pastas’²³ for dinner to-day. It was here, I tell you, just under these gloves; or stay, perhaps I pinned it on the pincushion.”

But neither under the gloves nor on the pincushion was the note to be found.

“Well,” said the Kyria at last, “your master must have taken it for something, and have forgotten to tell me. I shall meet him at the square. Come, let us go!”

“Kyria,” and Mattina stood in her way.

“What do you want? It is late.”

“Kyria, my uncle has sent me word that they have not seen me for many days, and that I must go there this afternoon, and also if you make difficulties, and keep me closed up, I am to tell you that he, my uncle, will come and take me away and find another house for me.”

All this was repeated very quickly, and as though Mattina had just learned it by heart.

Her mistress stared at her.

“Another house, indeed! And what house will take a lazy one like you? Do you think there are many mistresses who have as good a heart as I have, and will keep you only because they are sorry for you being an orphan? Besides, who says I keep you closed up? Do you not go for a walk nearly every day with the children? Also I was just going to tell you that as I have my sisters here this afternoon, who will help me with the children, you could go out. Of course I mean after you have washed up your plates, and put all in their places. And you are not to be late, mind!” she added as an afterthought. “Do you hear?”

“I hear,” said Mattina.

After the street door had banged to, she finished cutting up the aubergines, lined the baking dish thickly with the slices, added a layer of mince-meat, another of aubergines, broke two eggs over them, bread-crumbed them and carried them off to the oven in the next street, so quickly and so deftly that even her mistress, had she been there to watch her, could not have called her “lazy one.” After that she carved Bebeko’s promised boat from a large aubergine which she had kept back, and sharpened a bit of firewood for the mast.

It was nearly four that afternoon before she got up to the baker’s shop, and her uncle had already gone round to the coffee-house. Her aunt was in the courtyard, sorting out wood for the night’s baking, from a load which had been brought down from the hills the day before. Mattina set to work to help her, and her aunt told her that her uncle had said he was to be sent for as soon as she arrived, because he meant to take them both out to see something, … “something,” she added mysteriously, “that your eyes have never seen!” And then she went off to send the boy to call her husband.

When Kyra Demetroula returned after a few minutes’ absence, it was to find Mattina, who had come across a little sprig of thyme among the firewood, holding it tightly between her hands, close to her face, and smelling it with long indrawn breaths, the tears trickling down her cheeks.

Her aunt stared at her dumfounded. She had always been of the town.

“Are you mad, my child?” she exclaimed, throwing up her arms. “To be spoiling your heart over a bit of old herb! Give it to me! Let me throw it into the oven! What will your uncle say when he comes? He will think I have been giving you stick! Look at your eyes!”

“Never mind! Let me keep it! Oh, let me keep it! I beg of you to let me keep it, my aunt! Oh, it is so beautiful! It … it … brings back Poros to me,” and Mattina gulped down her sobs and dried her eyes on the back of her sleeve.

“Hush, now, I hear your uncle.”

He came in laughing, dressed in his Sunday best.

“Health to you, Mattina! You have been forgetting us for so long! And if you only knew where we are going! If you only but knew!”

And it is true they went to a wonderful place.

In a broad street, up and down which the crowded street cars were constantly running, they stopped at an entrance where a man sat behind a tiny little window, and Mastro Anastasi paid some money to him. Then they passed into a great big dimly lighted room, with many seats all in a row placed from one end to another; and a great many people and children were sitting in them. Mattina sat between her aunt and her uncle, and waited.

“Why do we sit here?” she asked at last, “and why is it dark?”

Suddenly a little bell tinkled, and at one end of the hall it became light; and then all sorts of extraordinary things passed before Mattina’s eyes.

She saw a motor car such as those which she had seen outside in the streets, but this one climbed up the walls of houses. She saw a funny short man running away, and a great number of people chasing him, and he upset a woman carrying a bottle of wine, and the wine was all spilt; and the woman was very angry, and got up, and followed after him with the rest; and he upset two men on a ladder who were painting a house, and all the paint ran over him, and they also chased him; and he upset a cart laden with eggs, and all the eggs broke, and the carter also ran after him, brandishing his whip; and he upset a whole shop front of plates and dishes, and they all broke, too, and came tumbling all over everyone; and when the people who were chasing had nearly caught him, the man ran upon some railway lines, and a railway train ran over him, and made him quite flat, but he sprang up quite well again; and he came to a bridge, and he jumped right into the water, and swam across to the other side, and all the other people jumped in after him, but they could not swim and they made a great splash in the water, and suddenly all the picture went out and Mattina did not know what happened afterwards.

But she saw many other things.

She saw a little girl in a lovely frock of lace playing with a big dog in a garden, and some men came and stole her and hid her in a dark cellar, and a lady and a gentleman who came into the garden wept and tore their hair, but the big dog sniffed the ground, and ran and ran, and sniffed again, and jumped over walls and found the child, and dragged her by her frock and brought her back to her father and mother; and the last Mattina saw of them, they were all sitting in the garden and patting and stroking the big dog.

Then she saw a seashore and rocks, in a place that her uncle told them was called Spain, which was so like the second little bay on the Monastery Road that she felt like crying again, but that picture went out at once; and when she saw a man putting a lighted candle in his mouth and swallowing it, she forgot to feel sad.

When at last they left the wonderful place, her uncle gave her a ten “lepta” copper coin, and stopped a street car that was passing. He told her to be sure to get out when she saw the grocer’s shop in the PirÆus Road at the corner of the street where her master lived, and Mattina climbed into the car with a big sigh.

It was still light when she got down off the car step and turned into the narrow street, still sniffing at the dry sprig of thyme which she had kept tightly clasped in her hand all the time.

Out of the gathering dusk, an old woman came running towards her.

“It is you, Mattina! It is you! And they said you would never come back.”

Mattina looked around her anxiously.

“Why did they say that, Kyra Polyxene? Is it so late?”

“No, it is not late. But you will find trouble for you at the house. Your mistress has lost money … much money … a twenty-five drachmÆ note, and she says that only you can have taken it.”

Mattina fell back a step and stared up at the old woman.

“I?”

“Yes, and your mistress got your bundle and took out all your things and threw them here and there; but she found naught, and she is spoiling the world with her screams.”

“Come!” said Mattina, “let me go and tell her she does not know what she says.”

But the old woman pulled her back.

“Listen, my girl! You are but a little one, without a whole shoe to your foot, and these people count every mouthful of bread you put into your mouth …. If it was in an evil moment?… Give it to me! and if it be not changed, I will put it where they may find it and the noise will be over.”

“You, also, do not know what you say,” and Mattina dragged her arm away and ran into the house.

The door of the living-room was open, and from it came the sound of angry voices and loud cries.

Mattina walked right in.

“I am here,” she announced, “and neither have I seen your ….”

But she could not finish her sentence; a furiously angry woman rushed at her, caught her by the shoulder, and shook her viciously.

“You thief!” she screamed. “You little thief! This is how you repay me for taking you in! And you have the face to speak also!”

If Mattina had been a poor little servant all her life, and if her parents had been servants before her, she would perhaps have insisted on her innocence more respectfully, but until lately she had always lived with her equals, and also she was the child of free islanders, who had never called any one their master.

With both hands she pushed her mistress away from her as hard as she could push.

“Leave me! Leave me I tell you! I a thief! I! It is you are a liar for saying so!”

But two heavy blows sent her staggering against the table.

Then it seemed as though all the people in the room were about to fall upon her, and she crouched there with uplifted arm to protect her head.

The master pushed aside his wife.

“Wait a moment!” he said. “Let me speak to her!” then to Mattina:—

“Tell me now what you have done with the money?”

“I never saw it, I tell you.”

“That does not pass with me; you have hidden it somewhere, or given it to someone.”

“Since I tell you I never saw it!”

“There is no one else in the house to take it. If you did not see it, where is it?”

“Do I know?” said Mattina, sullenly. “Is she not always losing her things?” and she pointed to her mistress.

Now because the woman was really constantly mislaying her belongings, this made her still more furious. She darted at Mattina.

“Wait till I show her!” and she struck her so hard a blow on the mouth, that Mattina screamed and covered her face with both arms.

Her mistress raised her hand again but one of her sisters pulled her back.

“Find the money first,” she said. “What do you gain by beating her?”

“You are right. If she has it on her, I will find it.”

And the woman went down on her knees and felt over Mattina, pulling her frock roughly about. In a moment she found the pins that closed the opening of the pocket, and dragged them out, thrusting her hand inside.

“Here it is!” she screamed triumphantly. “See! I have it!” and she waved the folded note which she pulled out of the pocket. But as soon as she looked at it, her tone changed to one of bitter disappointment.

“She has changed it, the shameless one, and this is all that remains!”

Mattina tried to snatch it from her.

“That is mine! That is mine! That is not yours! It is five drachmÆ. Give it to me! It is mine I tell you.”

Her mistress laughed aloud.

“She told Taki here that she had not a ‘lepton’ of her own.”

“That was before,” cried Mattina, wildly, beginning to sob. “That was before I had this. This is mine! It is mine! On my father’s soul, I tell you it is mine!”

“If it be yours,” asked one of the sisters, “where did you find it?”

“She gave it to me.”

“She! What she?”

“She, the Madmazella from the next house.”

“She tells lies!” broke in her mistress. “A governess, who works one day that she may eat the next! Has she money to give?”

“When did she give it to you?” asked the master.

“When she went away in the carriage to go to her country.”

Then they all laughed.

“Ah, of course, you thought of someone who has gone away and whom we cannot ask! You are very clever, my girl, but your cleverness will not pass with us!”

“Now, enough words,” said her mistress. “I shall lock her up in her room and send for the police inspector. Perhaps in prison they may get the truth out of her.”

Mattina turned as pale as wax.

She knew what prison was. Even in Poros she had seen men with their arms tied back with ropes, taken to Nauplia²⁴ to the big prison of the “Palamidi”;²⁵ and she had heard tales of those who had returned from there!

“To prison!” she gasped. “To prison! I?”

“Of course,” said her mistress, enjoying her terror. “Did you think that you could steal and then stay in honest houses? Now you will see what will happen to you, you little thief!”

Mattina stumbled back against the wall. The sweat sprang out on her face, she kept wetting her lips, and her hands groped before her as though she were in the dark.

Her mistress seized hold of her arm and pulled her towards the open door of the room. For the first moments she struggled wildly, and then feeling how useless it was, she let herself be dragged out of the door and up the few steps to her little dark room. Her mistress pushed open the door with her foot and thrust Mattina in so violently that she fell upon the mattress in the further corner. Then the key was pulled out of the keyhole, and the door locked and double-locked on the outside; then Mattina heard her mistress’s heavy tread descending to the room below.

It was quite dark already. Mattina was never allowed a candle in her room, nor even a floating wick in a tumbler of oil. “As though,” her mistress had said, “it were necessary to burn good oil for a serving maid to pull off her clothes and tumble on to her mattress.” As a rule she was so tired and sleepy, she did not mind; but now she was very frightened indeed, and fear is always worse in the dark.

She lay there, where she had been flung, huddled up against the wall, her eyes hidden in the bend of her arm.

Prison! They would send her to prison! She had heard of a man in Poros, Andoni, the joiner, who had broken open the money box of Sotiro, the coffee-house keeper, in the night, and he had been kept ten years in prison! She did not know how much money he had taken; she had never heard. How long would they keep her in prison if they thought she had stolen twenty-five drachmÆ; it was a great deal of money! And what would they do to her in prison? Was it a dark place under the ground? Oh, why was her father, her own “babba,” not alive to beat off the men of the police who would soon be coming to fetch her?

For a long time she cried and sobbed on the mattress without moving. When she opened her eyes she could distinguish nothing in the room, the darkness was like a thick black veil covering everything. There were voices, but they seemed distant; the house seemed still, with the stillness that brings terror with it.

Suddenly the dark seemed full of big hands with hooked fingers stretching out to clutch at her.

She ran wildly to the door and shook it, screaming aloud.

“Oh, my mother! My mother! Manitsa!²⁶ Where are you?”

In the meanwhile, her mistress, downstairs, was urging her husband to go to the police station.

“Just think of the little thief,” she was saying. “And I who kept her out of charity, though she broke a fortune in plates, because I thought that at least she had ‘clean hands.’ ”

“I wonder,” said an elderly man who had not yet spoken, and who was Taki’s godfather, “where the girl can have found this twenty-five drachmÆ note?”

“I put it myself on my chest of drawers under my pincushion this morning,” explained Mattina’s mistress. “When I came to go out with the children it was missing; and she, the little hypocrite, helped me to look for it everywhere.”

“Had the girl been alone in your room, since you had put the money there?” inquired the elderly man.

“Do I know? But she was there a long time messing about with the children and pretending to help to dress them. A note is easily slipped up a sleeve. Is it such a big thing? Well, when I could not find it I said to myself that doubtless Theophani must have taken it, and forgotten to tell me before he went out. You know how absent-minded he is. And when I met him in the square, I forgot to ask him, and never remembered till late this afternoon; and when he said he had never touched it, of course I knew at once it could only have been Mattina who had stolen it. Who else? And I, the stupid one, who have such confidence in people and never lock things up! Who knows how much more money she has taken at times?”

“Have you missed any, besides this?” asked the elderly man.

“I would have you know, my friend, that money is not so scarce in this house that we have to count exactly how many drachmÆ we leave about!” Then turning to her sisters: “Someone is knocking outside,” she said, “I must go and see who it is. You just take those children and put them to bed. They are fighting the whole time.”

It is true, there was a great noise and much whimpering when Bebeko was dragged out by one of his aunts from under the table, holding to a purple limp-looking object which was the half of his boat.

“Taki,” he sobbed, had “boken” his boat.

“He is a stupid one,” announced Taki. “What is it but a piece of aubergine, his boat?”

“Never mind, my little bird!” said the aunt, picking Bebeko up, “to-morrow I will buy you a new one; a real boat of wood!”

But to-morrow was far away for Bebeko. He kept tight hold of his half boat.

“The mast!” he cried as his aunt was carrying him off, “the mast, and my sail! They are under the table! They fell off! Taki made them fall!”

The aunt, who was a kind young woman, put down the child and stooped to look for “the mast and the sail,” creeping under the long table-cover to do so. When she found them, she stopped for a moment, looking at them, and then called to her sister who came back into the room with a newspaper in her hand.

“Angeliki! Look at this! Do you see with what the child has been playing?”

And she held out a piece of paper with two small holes pierced in it, through which was passed a sharpened stick.

And the piece of paper was a twenty-five drachmÆ note.

Bebeko’s mother snatched the note from her sister’s hand, and seized the child roughly.

“From where did you get this, you bad child? Who gave it to you? Was it Mattina?”

The child began to cry loudly.

“I want my sail! I want my sail! It is mine! It is not Mattina’s; it is mine!”

“From where did you get it? Tell me at once, or you will eat stick.”

“Do not frighten the child,” said the father, and he picked up Bebeko and set him on the table.

“Now tell me like a golden little boy that you are, where did you find this paper? Tell me, and Babba will give you a ‘loukoumi.’ ”²⁷

The child gulped down a big sob.

“Mattina had no rag to make a sail; she said to ask Mamma ….”

“And then?”

“I asked Mamma, and she said, ‘I have no rag, go away,’ and then I put the paper in my own self. It is mine.”

“Where did you find the paper?”

“On the floor.”

“But where on the floor.”

“Down on the floor.”

Then the youngest aunt said:—

“Come and show me where, Bebeko, and Babba will get the ‘loukoumi.’ ”

Bebeko scrambled down and took hold of her hand, and led her, all the others following, into his parents’ bedroom. Then, pointing to a spot at the foot of the chest of drawers, he said triumphantly:—

“There.”

His mother looked very vexed.

“Those children!” she cried. “Whatever they see, they take. All this fuss we have had for nothing!”

“Go upstairs, now,” said her husband, “and tell that poor girl that you have found the money. She was half mad with fright when you told her you would send her to prison.”

“It does not do her any harm,” said Mattina’s mistress, “if she did not do it this time, it will be a lesson for her if she ever feels inclined to steal in the future. However, she may as well come down and take the children to bed,” and she took a lighted candle, and went upstairs to unlock the door.

In a moment the others heard an astounded voice exclaiming:—

“Bah! She is not here!”

“Not there! Nonsense!” cried her husband; and they all ran up and peered into the little dark room.

But it was quite true, Mattina was not there.

They looked all round, but there was only the tumbled mattress on the floor, a red cotton coverlet hanging on a nail in the wall over it, a straw chair, a pitcher of water in a tin basin, and not a single cupboard, nook, or corner in which anyone could hide.

“The girl must have crept down quietly while we were talking, and run away to her uncle’s,” said the master.

“But the door was locked,” objected his wife.

“Impossible.”

“But it was, I tell you.”

“You meant to lock it but you did not.”

“I locked it and double locked it.”

“You were in a passion at the moment, and you did not know what you were doing.”

“Since I tell you I turned the key twice with my hand,” screamed his wife, getting very red. “Do I eat straw? I locked it and I locked it well. Do you not understand Greek? Shall I say it in Chinese?”

Her husband strode into the little room and, taking the lighted candle, lifted it high above his head.

“You women have no logic! Look!” turning to the others, “can the girl have climbed through the window?”

It was a tiny barred window over their heads, looking out upon a courtyard far below.

They all laughed.

“No, certainly!”

“Well, then, she must have got through the door! Come downstairs now, there is no use in staying up here. In the morning I will go to her uncle’s.”

Then as they left the room he turned to his wife who was still protesting violently that she had locked the door; she would lay her head that she had.

“Now enough words, wife! Perhaps you think the girl passed through the wall?”

And yet, had he but known it, that was very nearly what had happened. When Mattina, worn out with crying, had sunk down on the floor against the door, sobbing out every now and then, “My mother, my manitsa,” she suddenly heard a very low muffled knocking which seemed to come from the other side of the room. At first she took no heed. It was someone, she supposed, in the next house; she had often heard people moving there. But it came again, a soft little knock repeated twice; then her name just whispered.

“Mattina! Mattina! Are you there?”

The voice was Kyra Polyxene’s, she was quite sure, but from where did it come? She crossed the little room. The knock was quite clear now.

“Mattina!”

“But where are you, Kyra Polyxene?”

“Now you will see; can you hear what I say?”

“Yes, I hear you.”

“Move your mattress!”

“What did you say?”

“I dare not speak any louder; move your mattress away from the wall!”

Mattina seized hold of the heavy straw mattress with both hands, and dragged it aside.

“Have you done it?”

“Yes.”

Then slowly, very slowly, a narrow door painted exactly the same color as the rest of the room, with no handle, no crack even to show its outline or to distinguish it from the surrounding wall, a door which Mattina had certainly never seen before, was pushed open from the other side and Kyra Polyxene’s kind old face appeared in the opening.

“Not a word!” she whispered, with a finger on her lips. “Not a word for your life! Come!”

Mattina was very bewildered.

“Where shall I come? How did you get in?”

“Hush! Lest they hear us from below. Once this was all one big house, and when they made it two, they left this door. It was all painted over, and no one knew; but I remembered. Wait!” and she came right in. “Give me your coverlet! See I will hang it over the opening, so … because now that I have opened the door, when it is light they will see that the paint has cracked. And before that lazy mistress of yours takes the coverlet down to shake it, many days will pass. Come! Why are you waiting?”

“Kyra Polyxene,” said Mattina, “they all tell lies! I never saw their money!”

“And for that, will you stay here and let them take you and lock you in prison?”

There was a loud knocking at the door below.

Mattina clung desperately to Kyra Polyxene’s skirts.

“Do you hear?”

“I hear,” said the old woman grimly. “Come, I tell you! Come!”

She pushed Mattina first through the half-open door and followed, closing it softly behind her and turning a rusty key on the other side. They were standing in a small dark room filled with cases and lighted by one candle. Kyra Polyxene took up the candle. Then she clasped Mattina’s hand tightly in hers, and together, treading very softly, they crossed a long narrow passage outside the room, passed through a glass door, went down a flight of stone steps into a cellar where piles of wood were stacked, and then went up three or four steps again to a little back door that opened on the pavement.

The night air that blew in their faces felt fresh and cool.

“Listen, my daughter!” said the old woman. “Now you go straight to your uncle’s house! You know the way. If to-morrow dawns well, I will come and tell you what is happening. Go! Run! And the Holy Virgin be with you!”

At that moment loud voices came to them from the open window of the house which they had just left. Mattina thought she caught her name, and then she heard her master say very distinctly:—

“Go upstairs, now!…” but she did not hear the end of the sentence.

The men of the police must have come, and they were going upstairs to look for her!

Without a word, she dragged her hand from the old woman’s and ran wildly down the dark street.

She ran on and on, panting, stumbling, falling, picking herself up again, her plaits of hair which had come loose in the struggle with her mistress flying behind her. When she came out to the PirÆus Road, where a few people were still about, she stopped, and leaning against a lamp post, tried with trembling fingers to tie up her hair.

To her uncle’s! No! She would not go there!

She had not had time to explain to Kyra Polyxene that her master knew where the baker’s shop was. He had asked her one day. And of course it was there they would search for her at once. No, no! Not to her uncle’s! But where then? Where?

She tried hard to remember where Antigone had said that her brother lived. Perhaps she would hide her; she knew how bad mistresses could be! But try as she would, she could not remember. Athens names were all new and strange to her.

And there was no one else.

Perhaps she could walk about all night, or sit down on a bench? But when it dawned, what then? Suddenly she heard running steps in the street behind her and loud voices, … men’s voices. Was the one her master’s? She looked wildly round like a trapped thing and once more started running, as she had never run before, down the middle of the broad road. Every moment it seemed as if a hand were grasping her shoulder. She flew past the lighted grocer’s shop where they might know her, and her head struck against the open shutter, but she did not feel the pain. On she ran, her breath coming in loud gasps, and great throbs beating in her throat. She heard steps again …. Were they behind her?

Suddenly, under a lamp post, she came into violent contact with a big man, who was walking leisurely before her, his hands crossed behind his back, fiddling with a short string of black beads.

He caught hold of the lamp post to save himself from falling and turned round.

“Who falls in this way on people? Have you gone mad, my girl? One would think someone was hunting you.”

It was a Poros voice, and Mattina clung desperately to the baggy blue breeches of Thanassi Nika, as the old sea-captain bent over her.

“They are! They are!” she cried wildly, “they are hunting me! Save me! Save me! And may all your dead become saints!”

“Why? Why? What is happening here? Are you not Aristoteli Dorri’s daughter? Who is hunting you?”

“The people of the house; the master … the mistress … they have called the men of the police; they will put me in prison!”

“What have you done?” asked the old man sharply.

“I have done nothing. On the soul of my father, I have taken nothing of theirs. But money was lost, and they say I took it. Save me! Take me from here!”

Capetan Thanassi looked up and down the road.

Farther up towards the grocer’s shop two or three men seemed hurrying towards them, but just at that moment a bright light flashed in their eyes, and a street car going to the square came to a stop a few paces away.

The old man lifted Mattina bodily to the step and followed her. The little platform was crowded, and as they stood there tightly wedged between many people, he put his finger on his lips so that Mattina should keep silent. Almost at once in the big lighted square they got down again, and before Mattina had time to think where they might be going, she had been run across the road, down a broad street, through a crowded waiting-room, down an endless flight of stone steps, and was seated once more in a railway carriage, which started almost as soon as Capetan Thanassi threw himself down puffing and panting on the seat beside her.

“Well,” he said, wiping his forehead with a big red handkerchief, “it is not a good thing to be hunted and to run; but to let these Athenians, here, seize hold of Aristoteli Dorri’s daughter, and call her a thief! That could not be! Now, listen to me, little one! If you have done anything crooked, that is between God and your soul, but for me it is sufficient that I knew your father. My caique²⁸ leaves to-night, now, with the turn of the wind. I shall put you in it and take you back to your own country, and once there,… we shall see what can be done.”

Mattina had seized his hand and was kissing it.

“To my own island? To Poros? God make your years many, Capetan Thanassi, for this that you are doing for me!”

The big white caique at PirÆus was ready laden, only waiting for its captain, and an hour later, Mattina, in a little corner between two planks of wood and a big case, lay curled up on the low deck, with the cool night wind blowing salt and fresh on her face. She listened to the water flap-flapping against the wooden sides of the boat, and dimly saw the great white sails bellying out above her head. She heaved a big sigh of content and stretched out her feet under a loose piece of sack-cloth.

The harbor lights of PirÆus were already far behind them when, rocked by the softly swaying movement, she fell asleep.

And how good it was the next morning to awake at sea, with the sun high above the horizon on a blue September day, to feel safe and free, to lean over the side of the boat, munching the hunk of bread and the piece of “touloumi”²⁹ cheese which one of the sailors had given her, while she watched the swish and sparkle of the water as the tall prow of the caique divided it, and listened to Capetan Thanassi’s loud orders to his men, as they tacked round by the lighthouse.

Ah! and how good it was, as soon as they turned the corner, to see in the distance the white houses of Poros!

It was even better when she stepped down the plank thrown from the boat to the shore and was treading Poros soil once more. Then it was like dreams coming true! The caique had anchored far away from the village, in a little creek before one came to the Beach of the Little Pines. Someone from Athens was building a house there, a big house with balconies and terraces. Capetan Thanassi had brought a boat load of wood-work for the doors and windows, and the workmen were busy unloading it almost before the anchor had been dropped.

“What will you do?” the old captain asked Mattina. “Before noon, when this unloading is over, I shall sail into the village. Will you wait?”

“I thank you, Capetan Thanassi. For the good that you have done me, may you find it from God; but I cannot wait. I will go along the shore, and reach the house and the little one long before you have finished your work.”

“Go then, my girl! Go!” and Mattina ran up the slope of the hill leading to the Beach of the Little Pines, and did not stop to take breath until she reached the top.

There she stood still, waist-high in a tangle of bushes. The thyme was all dried up of course, but the heather was in bloom and the lentisk bushes were laden with thick clusters of red berries.

She dropped on her knees, with a little cry of joy, beside a big bush on which the bright crimson berries seemed thicker than the tiny leaves. “Fairy-cherries,” the children of the Red House on the hill, called them. Mattina had never heard this, but she loved the little tight bunches of red berries because they were so pretty and because she had never seen them but in Poros. In a moment she got up and began the descent of the hill.

The glorious curve of the Beach of the Little Pines seemed almost entirely deserted. The morning sea in lines of deep golden green near the pines of the shore, and of deep blue beyond, blue as the sky, blue as the flag, bore not a single fisher boat on its surface. Only far away in the distance under the big round fig tree Mattina could distinguish a flock of sheep, and still farther away the figure of a man coming down the next hill, but whether it was the shepherd or not she could not tell. Down she came through the tall white spikes of the dog-onions waving all over the hill side, till she stood at last on a flat gray rock on the very edge of the sea. The perfectly smooth water showed the shining yellow and green and gray pebbles lying below, as though a sheet of glass had been placed over them. In and out between the stones swam tiny black-striped fishes, and now and then a ripple trembled over the surface and broke softly against the rock. And it was clear and beautiful, and her very own sea, and she lifted her face to its breath, and she fell on her knees and stretched out her bare brown arms that the water might flow and ripple over them!

In the water close to the shore, every tiny green branch, and every vein of the gray rocks, and every clump of red earth, was reflected line for line, and tint for tint, and through these reflections ran long straight lines of bright, bright blue. Suddenly Mattina remembered Antigone, the serving maid of the next house, who had said to her, “You! with your trees, and your rocks, and your sea!” And she thought, “She has never seen them, the poor one! If she were only here now!”

But she did not know that Antigone was of those people who would never see some things, even if she were to touch them with her hand. She would find that the rocks hurt her feet and spoiled her Sunday shoes.

The morning light would never bring a light into her eyes, and certainly a little cool soft breeze blowing in her face could never have made her feel so entirely and unreasonably joyful.

Mattina could never have explained, nor did she understand as other children might, who had read books, or who had lived with people who had read books, that it was just the beauty of everything around her that made her feel so happy, that for some moments wiped all her troubles off her mind as though by a magic sponge. She had never heard that her ancestors were of the race which above all other had always worshipped beautiful things.

However, in a few moments she stood up, wiped her arms on her frock, and walked along the shore more soberly. She must get on, she felt; she must see the child—Zacharia. How he would laugh when he saw her! “’Attina! My ’Attina!” he would cry. Kyra Sophoula would say a good word to her also; but the others, her uncle Yoryi, and her aunt Kanella, what would they say? They would ask why she had returned. They would ask so many things; and what could she say? She had come back not much richer than she went; and now what could she do? She thought for a moment of the mayor and the doctor. Each of them kept a little maid. If only one of them would take her! How good that would be! She was stronger now, and had learned much in the town. But she knew it was not likely that either of them would be requiring a new serving maid just then. People here did not change their servants like shirts as they did in Athens. In Poros, one took a little girl, one did not even call her a servant, but a “soul-child”; one taught her, one fed her, one dressed her, and in due time one prepared her dowry for her. The doctor, she knew, had got Panouria, the widow’s daughter, as a “soul-child.” No, it was not at all likely; and Mattina heaved a big sigh as she filled her hands with cyclamen for Zacharia. Poros had its troubles too.

She had nearly reached the end of the big beach, and was stooping to pick a bright crimson cyclamen growing in the shadow of a lentisk bush, when suddenly a flat pebble skimmed past her, touched the surface of the water, and then flew from ripple to ripple like a thing alive.

“It is many years since I did that,” said a boyish voice just behind her. But when she wheeled round, it was no boy who stood there laughing and following the pebble with his eyes. It was a grown man, the one whom she had seen in the distance, coming down the hill, and it was certainly not a shepherd. It was a man wearing good clothes, like the men she had seen in Athens in the fine streets; better far than those her master wore; with a gold chain across his waistcoat. It was a man whom she had never seen before; tall, with thick brown hair and a small moustache, but whose sunburnt face did not seem strange to her.

He flung another pebble, swinging his arm well back and making it go still farther than the last.

“Did you see that one, my girl?” he said without looking at her. “I thought I had forgotten,… but see there,” as he flung a third and began counting,… “eleven,—twelve,—thirteen,—fourteen! I wish some of the lads from Lexington were here to see me. They never would believe that I could make it go more than ten times.”

“Throw another,” said Mattina who was interested, picking up a good flat one.

The man held out his hand for it and, as he did so, looked at the girl for the first time.

The pebble dropped to the shore between them.

“Why!” he said slowly, “Why! From where did you come? Not from the village?”

Mattina, her empty hand stretched out as though still holding the stone, looked at him.

“No,—I come from Athens. Only just now we have arrived.”

“Now?”

“Yes, in Capetan Thanassi’s caique.”

“You are from Athens?”

“Oh, no; from the island. I was only serving in the town.”

The man put his hand under Mattina’s chin, turned her face up, and took a long look at her.

“If you are not Aristoteli’s daughter, may they never call me Petro again.”

Mattina stared in wonderment. How came this well-dressed stranger to know her?

“Yes; I am Aristoteli Dorri’s the sponge diver’s.”

“God rest his soul,” added the man, “and your mother’s also! Little did I think to return to the island and find them both under the soil. And when I looked for you, they told me you had gone to serve in the town! How did this good thing happen that you should just have come back today? Now I need not take the steamer for Athens to go and search for you.”

“For me?”

“For who else? Do you think I mean to return to America all alone, and leave my brother’s daughter working for strange folk in strange houses!”

Mattina was beyond speech.

The young man put his arm round her shoulders.

“So you do not know me? Your uncle Petro? Truly how should you? You were a babe in swaddling clothes when I left the island. But look at me! Look at me, then! Have I not the same face as your father—the blessed one? All have told me so.”

A sudden enlightenment came into Mattina’s eyes. Of course he had her father’s face! The hair which came down in a point, the eyes that laughed; that was why he had not seemed strange. But her father had never worn such fine clothes, and his back had not been so straight.

Timidly she crept a little closer.

“My uncle,” she whispered looking up into the laughing boyish eyes, “are you my ‘family’ now?”

“Is it a question? Of course I am your family; and you are mine. Your mother’s cousins here and her brother in Athens, they good people, I do not say the contrary, but they have their own families for which to provide. I have no one, and you are mine now, and I shall work for you. It is ended now that you should work for strangers. You did well to leave them!”

“I did not mean to leave them; I did not know you were here on the island, my uncle, but I was afraid, and I ran away from their house.”

“Afraid! Why?”

Mattina flushed very red.

“They said I stole their money.”

“They called you a thief! My brother’s daughter! A bad year to them! But why did you run away as thieves run? You should have stayed and told them that they lied.”

“I told them. But they would not believe me though I swore it on my father’s soul; and the master was going to fetch the men to take me to prison, and I was afraid.”

“It is true, you are but a little one. But rest easy; no one shall make you afraid, now that I am here! We will go together to these people and if the master dares to say you stole, I will break his face for him!”

And Mattina saw that her uncle’s laughing eyes could look very fierce.

“Have you the money for which you served?”

“No, they had not given it to me yet.”

“We will get it. Rest easy! And how much did they agree to pay you for every month?”

“Eight drachmÆ.”

“Are they not ashamed? It is not even two dollars. And doubtless they made you work hard for it, eh?”

“There was always work, yes; but ….”

“But what?”

“She said that … that at New Year I should have a present. And now … now ….”

And Mattina suddenly realizing that the present, the long dreamed of present, was lost for ever, burst into wild sobs.

“Bah! Bah! And is it for their miserable present that you are spoiling your heart’s content? Am I not here to get you a far more beautiful present?”

Mattina lifted streaming eyes, full of wonder.

“You!”

“Who else? And what shall the present be?”

The heavens seemed opening in glory before Mattina’s dazzled eyes.

“Can I say whatever I like?”

“Surely.”

“Then I want … there is a picture in a shop in Athens, with a broad golden frame; it is the sea, and a boat on it with a white sail, and you can see the sail in the water all long and wavy, and if you touch the water, you think your finger will be wet. That is what I want.”

“You shall have your picture; we will hang it in our house in Lexington, where there is no sea, and it will remind us of our island.”

“Shall we not live here in Poros, my uncle?”

“Here? Not yet! I am young still, and strong, and I mean to earn more money in America than I have done already. Besides, I have to think of providing your dowry now, you see. In good time, when I am older, and you are a woman grown, then, if God wills it, we will return to the island. It is not good to leave one’s bones in a strange land. No; in eight days we go down to PirÆus to leave for America in a great big ship, bigger than you have ever seen before, even in your sleep, and when we get there, to America, you shall see what your eyes will see!”

“My uncle!”

“Yes.” Then as no words came, he added, “Say what you want! You must not fear to ask for whatever your heart desires.”

“My uncle, there is Zacharia too ….”

“What? The little one? I saw him at Kyra Kanella’s. He is very little.” Just for a second the young man hesitated, then—

“Can you care for him on the journey, my maid? A journey of many days, mind you, with a sea which may make you ill; a rough green sea with waves as high as houses; not like this blue joy here. Can you?”

“Surely,” said Mattina, “I can do many things.”

Her uncle looked at the sturdy little figure, and at the strong firm little chin.

“I believe you can,” he said. “Come!” holding out his hand, “let us go and find the little rascal.”

1 Kyra means Dame, or Goody: thus, Goody Kanella was Mattina’s aunt. At the end of the book there are notes marked 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., explaining the meaning of the Greek words used, and describing briefly certain events in Greek history.?