Soon, however, the children learned to love her, for her heart was gentle, and she loved all little creatures. She brought them sea-urchin shells, delicately cleaned, and showing all their beauty of green and pale purple; chains of gold-shells, or of dried sea-bladders. The children took the gifts eagerly, and at length grew familiar, and questioned Isla about her life at the south end of the island.
“What makes you live there, Isla? Why don’t you never come up to the street, and live in a house like other folks? My mother says decent folks wouldn’t live there in those bogy rocks. What makes you stay there?”
Then Isla would throw her head back, and draw a long breath as she looked about her at the bare, dingy walls of the little schoolroom.
“It isn’t living, here!” she would say. “It’s—I don’t know what it is! there’s no air to breathe. Where I live, the wind blows in from the sea, and it comes from all across the world; and I don’t have to be under a roof,—I hate roofs,—only just at night and in the winter; and I have the rocks, and the sheep, and my little Jacob, and all the things in the woods. Don’t you go in the woods? But what makes you live here, in these houses all near each other? That’s the strange way, not mine; mine is the real way. What makes you do it?”
“’Cause the school’s here, and the store!” said another.
“’Cause there’s folks, and folks like to be where there’s other folks!” said a third; and the rest chimed in, as this sentiment voiced the feelings of all.
“Yes, folks like to be where there’s other folks.”
Then Isla would shake her long locks, and laugh, and begin to sing one of her strange songs, or tell them of the wonderful things in her home, which stretched miles and miles, all her own, all a playground for her and Jacob.
So things went on well enough for a time; but one day Isla took some of the children off, at their urgent request, and kept them a day and a night in some familiar haunt of hers among the hills. Their parents were frantic, and searching parties were sent out in all directions. The dumb woman could or would tell them nothing; she only shrugged her shoulders, and showed them that her own little boy was gone with his sister and the rest. They were ready to burn her cabin over her head, when down the hill came Isla singing, a child in either hand, another leaping and singing beside her. She was seized, threatened with punishment, and warned never to come to the school again.