Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/275

Rh mineral any more than you. Ceylon is full of them. This box was made by my most devoted lover and convert, Phaya Si Zai. He sat on the veranda of my cottage every day last week, tinkering away on it. That is the way the native jewelers do here. They bring their little furnaces and tools, squat on your veranda, and make your jewelry under your eye. Phaya will not take a cent for making this box, though it has cost him six days' work. The chasing, you will see, is very finely done. He has seen your picture hanging in my room, and when I showed him the stones and asked him if a box could be made of them for the pretty lady with gold hair, he said, eagerly: 'Yes, yes. Me make, me make.' When he brought it to me just now he said: 'Lady of gold hair—this—Phaya kiss the hands—stones make lady see Phaya; see good brother.' So you see even the Ceylonese know the spell of the tourmaline."

Our little girl seems to have the same love for and relation with the stones that her mother had. She will play with them for hours, as Ally did when she lay in her little bed, under the abutilon-tree, in the parsonage parlor. The child's name is Alice; but I have fallen into the way of calling her "Tourmie," and strangers stare when they ask what that means, and I reply: "Short for Tourmaline."