She Also Liked To Be Surrounded By All The Other Females In The House, Her Two Daughters And The Indoor Servants, Four Or Five In Number, All Full-Blooded Negresses, Black But Comely, Fat, Pleasant-Looking, Laughing Young And Middle-Aged Women, All As A Rule Dressed In White.

They were unmarried, but two or three of them were the mothers of certain small darkies to be seen playing about and rolling in the dust near the servants' quarters at the far end of the long low house.

The eldest daughter, Eulodia, was about fifteen as I first remember her, a tall slim handsome girl with blue-black hair, black eyes, coral-red lips, and a remarkably white skin without a trace of red colour in it. She was no doubt just like what her mother had been when the dashing impressionable young George Royd had first met her and lost his heart - and soul. The younger sister, about eight at that time, was a perfect contrast to Eulodia: she had taken after her father, and in colour and appearance generally was a perfect little English girl of the usual angel type, with long shining golden hair, worn in curls, eyes of the purest turquoise blue, and a complexion like the petals of a wild rose. Adelina was her pretty name, and to us Adelina was the most beautiful human being in the world, especially when seen with her dusky little playmate Liberata, who was of the same age and height and was the child of one of the black servants. These two had grown fond of each other from the cradle, and so Liberata had been promoted to be Adelina's constant companion in the house and to wear pretty dresses. Being a _mulatita_ she was dark or dusky skinned, with a reddish tinge in the duskiness, purple-red lips, and liquid black eyes with orange-brown reflections in them - the eyes called tortoiseshell in America. Her crisp cast-iron coloured hair was worn like a fleece round her small head, and her features were so refined one could only suppose that her father had been a singularly handsome as well as a white man. Adelina and Liberata were inseparable, except at meal-times, when the dusky little girl had to go back among her own tribe on the mother's side; and they formed an exquisite picture as one often saw them, standing by the Senora's chair with their arms round each other's necks - the pretty dark-skinned child and the beautiful white child with shining hair and blue forget-me-not eyes.

Adelina was her father's favourite, but he was fond of all his people, the black servants included, and they of him, and the life at Casa Antigua appeared to be an exceedingly happy and harmonious one.

Looking back at this distance of time it strikes me when I come to think of it, that it was a most extraordinary _menage_, a collection of the most incongruous beings it would be possible to bring together - a sort of Happy Family in the zoological sense.

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