Two years in the French West Indies

One day, in the second hour of the afternoon, a few moments after leaving home, there will come to you a sensation such as you have never known before: a sudden weird fear of th...

But during this time the Devil had begun to smell badly and he had become swollen so big that Yé found he could not move him. Still, they knew they must get him out of the way s...

Going to Grande Anse from the chief city, one can either hire a horse or carriage at St. Pierre, or ascend to Morne Rouge by the public conveyance, and there procure a vehicle o...

And it is partly, perhaps, because of these conditions that the coming of the dawn does not dissipate all fears of the supernatural. _I ni pè zombi mênm gran'-jou_ (he is afraid...

As seen with a field-glass from St. Pierre, these woods present only the appearance of a band of moss belting the volcano, and following all its corrugations,--so densely do the...

... Returning to Martinique with new titles to distinction, Labat was made Superior of the order in that island, and likewise Vicar-Apostolic. After building the Convent of the...

What is the secret of that horror inspired by the centipede?... It is but very faintly related to our knowledge that the creature is venomous;--the results of the bite are only...

All at once the peak vibrates to a tremendous sound from somewhere below.... It is only a peal of thunder; but it startled at first, because the mountain rumbles and grumbles oc...

... She leads the way.... Behind them the tremendous glow deepens;--before them the gloom. Enormous gnarled forms of ceiba, balata, acoma, stand dimly revealed as they pass; mas...

The St. Pierre fishermen very seldom approach the bay, but they do much fishing a few miles beyond it, almost in front of the Pointe du Rochet and the Roche à Bourgaut. There th...

And new legends are even now being made; for in this remote colony, to which white immigration has long ceased,--a country so mountainous that people are born and buried in the...

... It seems to you that you could never weary of watching this picturesque life,--of studying the costumes, brilliant with butterfly colors,--and the statuesque semi-nudity of...

The poor buy the brightly colored fish only when the finer qualities are not obtainable at low rates; but often and often the catch is so enormous that half of it has to be thro...

... Only now do the long succession of exotic and unfamiliar impressions received begin to group and blend, to form homogeneous results,--general ideas or convictions. Strongest...

... Then you begin to look about you at the faces of the black, brown, and yellow people who are watching you curiously from beneath their Madras turbans, or from under the shad...

But Barbadoes differs also from most of the Antilles geologically; and there can be no question that the nature of its soil has considerably influenced the physical character of...

Whoever stops for a few months in St. Pierre is certain, sooner or later, to pass an idle half-hour in that charming place of Martinique idlers,--the beautiful Savane du Fort,--...

... I hire a carriage to take me to the nearest coolie village;--a delightful drive.... Sometimes the smooth white road curves round the slope of a forest-covered mountain;--som...

_Souvenir de not promenades,--de nos voyages,--de nos causeries,--des sympathies échangées,--de tout le charme d'une amitié inaltérable et inoubliable,--de tout ce qui parle à l...

Then came the general colonial crash!... You cannot see its results without feeling touched by them. Everywhere the weird beauty, the immense melancholy of tropic ruin. Magnific...

--sing the Devil and his chorus. His chant is cavernous, abysmal,--booms from his chest like the sound of a drum beaten in the bottom of a well.... _Ti maillelà, baill moin lavo...

Even after dark the touch of the wind has the warmth of flesh. There is no moon; the sea-circle is black as Acheron; and our phosphor wake reappears quivering across it,--seemin...

We stay at Roseau only long enough to land the mails, and wonder at the loveliness of the island. A beautifully wrinkled mass of green and blue and gray;--a strangely abrupt pea...

To-day a fer-de-lance is seldom found exceeding six feet in length; but the dimensions of the reptile, at least, would seem to have been decreased considerably by man's warring...

... Before the visitation few quarters were so densely peopled: there were living often in one small house as many as fifty. The poorer classes had been accustomed from birth to...

Believing in these things, and withal unable to decide whether the sun revolved about the earth, or the earth about the sun,[14] Père Labat was, nevertheless, no more credulous...

The precise time of the first introduction of slaves into Martinique is not now possible to ascertain,--no record exists on the subject; but it is probable that the establishmen...

Cyrilla's solicitude for me extends beyond the commonplaces of hygiene and diet into the uncertain domain of matters ghostly. She fears much that something might happen to me th...

And scarcely less rare than such sudden deaths are instances of failure to appear on time. In one case, the employer, a St. Pierre shopkeeper, on finding his marchande more than...

Yet wonderful as are the perspective beauties of those mountain routes from which one can keep St. Pierre in view, the road to Morne Rouge surpasses them, notwithstanding that i...

A single glance at the topographical map of Martinique would suffice to confirm the father's assertion that the country was found to be _trop haché et trop montueux_: more than...

--"Thou thinkest the Bon-Dié like thyself!--He has not eyes like thou," protested Stéphane. "_Li pas ka tiny coulé; li pas ka tini zié_" (He has not color; He has not eyes), con...

... Thou dim and lofty heaven of the North,--grey sky of Odin,--bitter thy winds and spectral all thy colors!--they that dwell beneath thee know not the glory of Eternal Summer'...