Excerpt from Pirates of the Spring These two, in short, were firm friends; they had been so ever since the priest, three years ago, had come up rth to take charge of a Jesuit Mission that had t proved entirely successful. Mrs Traill, also, was a southerner. One recognised it at once from the softened vowels, the sweetness of her voice, her colouring that suggested a remote Spanish ancestry, less than from a certain gracious indolence of manner. Thus, quite apart from any more ghostly relation, their friendship was established by the fact that they both felt themselves to be more or less in the position of aliens among these dour rthern Protestants, whose standards - the standards of a shrewd, commercial - race were so different from theirs. Mrs Traill, it is true, had lived in the rth for eighteen years (ever since her marriage, and she had married very young), but, spiritually, she had never become naturalised to this more wintry, more strenuous climate. She had made few friends, though of course she knew everybody, and she often wondered why, after her husband's death, she should have continued to live on among people who so seldom amused her. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art techlogy to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.