island with me, but when the time came to set out he
excused himself, so I resolved to go alone. But knowing that I should
often have to camp out in the woods alone, I took two negroes with me to
carry provisions, and I armed myself with a double-barrel gun and a
couple of pistols, for fear I should encounter one of the bands of
runaway slaves that hide in the deserted part of the island.

Striking out through the plains of Saint Pierre, we walked for four days
along the seashore, with the dense and silent forest on our left hand.
On crossing the black river I came to the last farm on this part of the
coast. It was a long hut, formed of stakes and covered with palm leaves.
There was only one room. In the middle of it was the kitchen; at one
extremity were the stores and the sleeping places of the eight black
slaves; the other end was the farmer's bed; a hen was setting on some
eggs on the counterpane, and some ducks were living beneath the bed, and
around the leafy wall pigeons had made their nests. In this miserable
hut I was surprised to find a very beautiful woman. She was a young
Frenchwoman, born, like her husband, of a good family. They had come to
the island some years ago in the hope of making a fortune; they had left
their parents, their friends, and their native land, to pass their lives
in this wild and lonely place, from which one could see only the empty
sea and the grim precipices of a desolate mountain. But the air of
contentment and goodness of this young and lovely mother of a growing
family seemed to make everybody around her happy. When evening came she
invited me to share a simple, but neatly-served supper. The meal
appeared to me an exceedingly pleasant one. I was given as a bed-room a
little tent built of wood, about a hundred steps away from the log
cabin. As the door had not been put up, I closed the opening with
planks, and loaded my gun and pistols; for the forest all around is full
of runaway slaves. A few years ago forty of them began to make a
plantation on the mountain close by; the white settlers surrounded them
and called on them to surrender, but rather than return to captivity all
the slaves threw themselves into the sea.

I stayed with the farmer and his wife until three o'clock the next
morning. The farmer walked with me as far as Coral Point. He was a
remarkably robust man, and his face and arms and legs were burnt by the
sun. Unlike the ordinary settler, he worked himself in tilling