the
skies, their indignation and loathing were well sustained, with a
frankness, indeed, which only embittered their condition. They suffered,
but could not dissimulate.

But they were at once volatile and of a languid frame, which could not
long repel the enticements of wine and passionate excess, liable to
petty rages, incapable of concentration, with no power of remembering
anything but a benefit, lavish fawners, but not hearty haters, easily
persuaded, and easily repenting of everything but hospitality. No abuse
of that put the drop of savage blood in motion, till the Spaniards began
to regard their women with indiscriminate desire. That was the first
outrage for which a Spanish life had to atone. But neither treachery nor
cruelty lurked beneath their flowery ways; it was sullen despair which
broke their gayety, brief spasms of wrath followed by melancholy. But
they could not keep their ideas well enough in hand to lay a plot.

These graceful children, with their curious prognostics of a Creole
temper, were not devoid of religion. The Creator has set none of His
children in the sun, to work or play, without keeping this hold
upon them. They defer to this restraint, with motions more or less
instinctive, but can never, in their wildest gambols, break entirely
loose. It is not easy to separate the real beliefs of the Haytians
from the conjectures of Catholic and Jewish observers. The former were
interested to discover analogies which would make it appear that they
had been foreordained to conversion; the latter were infested with the
notion that they were descendants of one of the Lost Tribes. What, for
instance, can be made of the assertion that the Haytian Supreme had a
mother? The natives were gentle enough to love such a conception, and to
be pleased with the Catholic presentation of it, but this is the only
proof we have that they originated it. It would be pleasant to believe
that they referred, in some dim way, their sense of the womanly quality
back to the great Source of Life.

But the Hebrew coincidences were as eagerly sought.[L] If a cacique
remarked to Columbus that he thought good men would be transported to a
place of delights, and bad men to a foul and dismal place where darkness
reigned, it was deemed to be a reminiscence of Sheol and a later Jewish
idea of Paradise. If Anacaona, the charming wife of Caonabo, came
forth to meet the _Adelantado_, at the head of thirty maidens of her
household, danc