Benita, An African Romance

Excerpt from the book...Beautiful, beautiful was that night! No air that stirred; the blacksmoke from the funnels of the mail steamer _Zanzibar_ lay low over thesurface of the sea like vast, floating ostrich plumes that vanished oneby one in the starlight. Benita Beatrix Clifford, for that was her fullname, who had been christened Benita after her mother and Beatrix afterher father's only sister, leaning idly over the bulwark rail, thoughtto herself that a child might have sailed that sea in a b