Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/88

 flock, she grew erect, strong, bold, bright, handsome; with a clear, colourless skin; and brown, lustrous, astonished eyes, and bright bronze-hued hair that Joconda brushed back from her brow in rippling masses, and cut short at the throat.

In summer she was clothed in the grey homespun linen that Joconda made, and in winter she was clad in blue or white woollen stuff instead; both short, straight little garments, very like in form to those of the Florentine choristers of Luca della Robbia.

In all weathers it was her delight to cast this off, and plunge into the sea and float there, indifferent to wind or sun; and this passion for the water got for her in her fourth year a popular name in Santa Tarsilla, which quite displaced and effaced the saintly one she had been baptised by; she was always called by the people—the few sickly suffering people, to whom the sea was but a breeding bed for fish—the velia, or sea-cull, that larus marinus, with plumage white as his native snows, which came from the northern ocean as soon as the north wind blew.

C'è una velia! an old man had said