I must tell you, first, how this rosary came about, any way. You know
we've a million of ancestors, and one of them, my great-grandfather, was
a sea-captain, and actually did bring home cargoes of slaves; but once
he fetched to his wife a little islander, an Asian imp, six years old,
and wilder than the wind. She spoke no word of English, and was full
of short shouts and screeches, like a thing of the woods. My
great-grandmother couldn't do a bit with her; she turned the house
topsy-turvy, cut the noses out of the old portraits, and chewed the
jewels out of the settings, killed the little home animals, spoiled the
dinners, pranced in the garden with Madam Willoughby's farthingale and
royal stiff brocades rustling yards behind,--this atom of a shrimp,--or
balanced herself with her heels in the air over the curb of the well,
scraped up the dead leaves under one corner of the house and fired
them,--a favorite occupation,--and if you left her stirring a mess in
the kitchen, you met her, perhaps, perched in the china-closet and
mumbling all manner of demoniacal prayers, twisting and writhing and
screaming over a string of amber gods that she had brought with her
and always wore.
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