street outside, not quite absorbed by the heat and still filled with green slime and lurking promise of pestilence.
On the harbour-side, an archway in the wall led to a flight of steps worn by the travel of countless smugglers, freebooters, and unclassified cutthroats of the past centuries. The stairway descended to a little wharf, by whose side a native rowboat and a launch rose and fell in the water gently lapping against the stone walls. Through the doorway, the port lights of a nondescript tramp steamer and their own trim yacht gleamed in the roadstead.
In the new-born breeze from off the waters, the trees began to whisper. The hum of conversation, like but more musically modulated than the drone of insects, rose in the courtyard, with an occasional epithet in some strange dialect, or northern oath, from the ill-assorted group of natives, sailors, derelicts and adventurers, who gave "The Café of Many Tongues" its name.
Passing between the rows of twinkling cigarettes, they chose a place in the favouring shadows of the wall fronting the street. A depression in the yard rendered useless the fourth leg, whose see-saw tilt enraged Phil in his present irritable mood, and he snarled out some cursing criticism of the place, loudly demanding a waiter.
Instead of an obsequious, false-shirt-fronted attendant, came a graceful langourous girl with sparks of temper, the adopted daughter of the proprietor and evidently a favourite with the old patrons of the place, who called her "Linda,"[1] which in their tongue means "the beautiful one."
- ↑ Pronounced Leanda.
