this, not because the creole whites, many of whom have been educated in Paris, are naturally narrow-minded, or incapable of sympathy with the mental expansion of the age, but because the religious question at Martinique has become so intimately complicated with the social and political one, concerning which there can be no compromise whatever, that to divorce the former from the latter is impossible. Roman Catholicism is an element of the cement which holds creole society together; and it is noteworthy that other creeds are not represented. I knew only of one Episcopalian and one Methodist in the island,--and heard a sort of legend about a solitary Jew whose whereabouts I never could discover;--but these were strangers.

It was only through the establishment of universal suffrage, which placed the white population at the mercy of its former slaves, that the Roman Church sustained any serious injury. All local positions are filled by blacks or men of color; no white creole can obtain a public office or take part in legislation; and the whole power of the black vote is ungenerously used against the interests of the class thus politically disinherited. The Church suffers in consequence: her power depended upon her intimate union with the wealthy and dominant class; and she will never be forgiven by those now in power for her sympathetic support of that class in other years. Politics yearly intensify this hostility; and as the only hope for the restoration of the whites to power, and of the Church to its old position, lies in the possibility of another empire or a revival of the monarchy, the white creoles and their Church are forced into hostility against republicanism and the republic. And political newspapers continually attack Roman Catholicism,--mock its tenets and teachings,--ridicule its dogmas and ceremonies,--satirize its priests.

In the cities and towns the Church indeed appears to retain a large place in the affection of the poorer classes;--her ceremonies are always well attended; money pours into her coffers; and one can still wittness the curious annual procession of the "converted,"--aged women of color and negresses going to communion for the first time, all wearing snow-white turbans in honor of the event. But among the country people, where the dangerous forces of revolution exist, Christian feeling is almost stifled by ghastly beliefs of African origin;--the images and crucifixes still command respect, but this respect is inspired by a feeling purely fetichistic. With the political dispossession of the whites, certain dark powers, previously concealed or repressed, have obtained , formidable development. The old enemy of Père Labat, the wizard (the _quimboiseur_), already wields more authority than the priest, exercises more terror than the magistrate, commands more confidence than the physician. The educated mulatto class may affect to despise him; --but he is preparing their overthrow in the dark. Astonishing is the persistence with which the African has clung to these beliefs and practices, so zealously warred upon by the Church and so mercilessly punished by the courts for centuries. He still goes to mass, and sends his children to the priest; but he goes more often to the quimboiseur and the "_magnetise_." He finds use for both beliefs, but gives large preference to the savage one,--just as he prefers the pattering of his tam tam to the music of the military band at the _Savane du Fort_.... And should it come to pass that Martinique be ever totally abandoned by its white population,--an event by no means improbable in the present order of things,--the fate of the ecclesiastical fabric so toilsomely reared by the monastic orders is not difficult to surmise.

VI.

From my window in the old Rue du Bois-Morin,--which climbs the foot of Morne Labelle by successions of high stone steps,--all the southern end of the city is visible as in a bird's-eye view. Under me is a long peaking of red-scaled roofs,--gables and dormer-windows,--with clouds of bright green here and there,-- foliage of tamarind and corossolier;--westward purples and flames the great circle of the Caribbean Sea;--east and south, towering to the violet sky, curve the volcanic hills, green-clad from base to summit;--and right before me the beautiful Morne d'Orange, all palm-plumed and wood-wrapped, trends seaward and southward. And every night, after the stars come out, I see moving lights there,--lantern fires guiding the mountain-dwellers home; but I look in vain for the light of Père Labat.

And nevertheless,--although no believer in ghosts,--I see thee very plainly sometimes, thou quaint White Father, moving through winter-mists in the narrower Paris of another century; musing upon the churches that arose at thy bidding under tropic skies; dreaming of the primeval valleys changed by thy will to green- gold seas of cane,--and the strong mill that will bear thy name for two hundred years (it stands solid unto this day),--and the habitations made for thy brethren in pleasant palmy places,--and the luminous peace of thy Martinique convent,--and odor of roasting parrots fattened upon _grains de bois d'Inde_ and guavas,--"_l'odeur de muscade et de girofle qui fait plaisir_."...

Eh, Père Labat_!--what changes there have been since thy day! The White Fathers have no place here now; and the Black Fathers, too, have been driven from the land, leaving only as a memory of them the perfect and ponderous architecture of the Perinnelle plantation-buildings, and the appellation of the river still known as the Rivière des Pères. Also the Ursulines are gone, leaving only their name on the corner of a crumbling street. And there are no more slaves; and there are new races and colors thou wouldst deem scandalous though beautiful; and there are no more parrots; and there are no more diablotins. And the grand woods thou sawest in their primitive and inviolate beauty, as if fresh from the Creator's touch in the morning of the world, are passing away; the secular trees are being converted into charcoal, or sawn into timber for the boat-builders: thou shouldst see two hundred men pulling some forest giant down to the sea upon the two-wheeled screaming thing they call a "devil" (_yon diabe_),-- cric-crac!--cric-crac!--all chanting together;--

"_Soh-soh!--yaïe-yah! Rhâlé bois-canot!_"

And all that ephemeral man has had power to change has been changed,--ideas, morals, beliefs, the whole social fabric. But the eternal summer remains,--and the Hesperian magnificence of azure sky and violet sea,--and the jewel-colors of the perpetual hills;--the same tepid winds that rippled thy cane-fields two hundred years ago still blow over Sainte-Marie;--the same purple shadows lengthen and dwindle and turn with the wheeling of the sun. God's witchery still fills this land; and the heart of the stranger is even yet snared by the beauty of it; and the dreams of him that forsakes it will surely be haunted--even as were thine own, Père Labat--by memories of its Eden-summer: the sudden leap of the light over a thousand peaks in the glory of tropic dawn,--the perfumed peace of enormous azure noons,--and shapes of palm wind-rocked in the burning of colossal sunsets,--and the silent flickering of the great fire-flies through the lukewarm darkness, when mothers call their children home... "_Mi fanal Pè Labatt!--mi Pè Labatt ka vini pouend ou!_"

CHAPTER IV. LA GUIABLESSE.

I.

Night in all countries brings with it vaguenesses and illusions which terrify certain imaginations;--but in the tropics it produces effects peculiarly impressive and peculiarly sinister. Shapes of vegetation that startle even while the sun shines upon them assume, after his setting, a grimness,--a grotesquery,--a suggestiveness for which there is no name.... In the North a tree is simply a tree;--here it is a personality that makes itself felt; it has a vague physiognomy, an indefinable _Me_: it is an Individual (with a capital I); it is a Being (with a capital B).

From the high woods, as the moon mounts, fantastic darknesses descend into the roads,--black distortions, mockeries, bad dreams,--an endless procession of goblins. Least startling are the shadows flung down by the various forms of palm, because instantly recognizable;--yet these take the semblance of giant fingers opening and closing over the way, or a black crawling of unutterable spiders....

Nevertheless, these phasma seldom alarm the solitary and belated Bitaco: the darknesses that creep stealthily along the path have no frightful signification for him,--do not appeal to his imagination;--if he suddenly starts and stops and stares, it is not because of such shapes, but because he has perceived two specks of orange light, and is not yet sure whether they are only fire-flies, or the eyes of a trigonocephalus. The spectres of his fancy have nothing in common with those indistinct and monstrous umbrages: what he most fears, next to the deadly serpent, are human witchcrafts. A white rag, an old bone lying in the path, might be a _malefice_ which, if trodden upon, would cause his leg to blacken and swell up to the size of the limb of an elephant;--an unopened bundle of plantain leaves or of bamboo strippings, dropped by the way-side, might contain the skin of a _Soucouyan._ But the ghastly being who doffs or dons his skin at will--and the Zombi--and the _Moun-Mò_--may be quelled or exorcised by prayer; and the lights of shrines, the white gleaming of crosses, continually remind the traveller of his duty to the Powers that save. All along the way there are shrines at intervals, not very far apart: while standing in the radiance of one niche-lamp, you may perhaps discern the glow of the next, if the road be level and straight. They are almost everywhere,-- shining along the skirts of the woods, at the entrance of ravines, by the verges of precipices;--there is a cross even upon the summit of the loftiest peak in the island. And the night- walker removes his hat each time his bare feet touch the soft stream of yellow light outpoured from the illuminated shrine of a white Virgin or a white Christ. These are good ghostly company for him;--he salutes them, talks to them, tells them his pains or fears: their blanched faces seem to him full of sympathy;--they appear to cheer him voicelessly as he strides from gloom to gloom, under the goblinry of those woods which tower black as ebony under the stars.... And he has other companionship. One of the greatest terrors of darkness in other lands does not exist