.
Cook to some good bourgeois family in Paris, he had fallen in love
with his master's daughter, and she with him. And when their love
was hopeless, and discovered, the two young foolish things, not
having--as is too common in France--the fear of God before their
eyes, could think of no better resource than to shut themselves up
with a pan of lighted charcoal, and so go they knew not-whither.
The poor girl went--and was found dead. But the boy recovered; and
was punished with twenty years of Cayenne; and here he was now, on a
sort of ticket-of-leave, cooking for his livelihood. I talked a
while with him, cheered him with some compliments about the
Parisians, and so forth, dear to the Frenchman's heart--what else
was there to say?--and so left him, not without the fancy that, if
he had had but such an education as the middle classes in Paris have
not, there were the makings of a man in that keen eye, large jaw,
sharp chin. 'The very fellow,' said some one, 'to have been a
first-rate Zouave.' Well: perhaps he was a better man, even as he
was, than as a Zouave.

And so we rode away again, and through Valencia, and through San
Josef, weary and happy, back to Port of Spain.

I would gladly, had I been able, have gone farther due westward into
the forests which hide the river Oropuche, that I might have visited
the scene of a certain two years' Idyll, which was enacted in them
some forty years and more ago.

In 1827 cacao fell to so low a price (two dollars per cwt.) that it
was no longer worth cultivating; and the head of the F--- family,
leaving his slaves to live at ease on his estates, retreated, with a
household of twelve persons, to a small property of his own, which
was buried in the primeval forests of Oropuche. With them went his
second son, Monsignor F---, then and afterwards cure of San Josef,
who died shortly before my visit to the island. I always heard him
spoken of as a gentleman and a scholar, a saintly and cultivated
priest of the old French School, respected and beloved by men of all
denominations. His church of San Josef, though still unfinished,
had been taxed, as well as all the Roman Catholic churches of the
island, to build the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Port of Spain; and
he, refusing to obey an order which he considered unjust, threw up
his cure, and retreated with the rest of the family to the palm-leaf
ajoupas in the forest.

M. F--- chose three o