gh each there runs a full
and ample river, swarming with fish, and yielding waterpower enough to
drive all the mills which industry could build. In these valleys and on
the rich levels along the shore the French had once their cane fields
and orange gardens, their pineapple beds and indigo plantations.

Labat, who travelled through the island at the close of the seventeenth
century, found it at that time chiefly occupied by Caribs. With his
hungry appetite for knowledge, he was a guest in their villages,
acquainted himself with their characters and habits, and bribed out of
them by lavish presents of brandy the secrets of their medicines and
poisons. The Pere was a clever, curious man, with a genial human
sympathy about him, and was indulgent to the faults which the poor
coloured sinners fell into from never having known better. He tried to
make Christians of them. They were willing to be baptised as often as he
liked for a glass of brandy. But he was not very angry when he found
that the Christianity went no deeper. Moral virtues, he concluded
charitably, could no more be expected out of a Carib than reason and
good sense out of a woman.

At Roseau, the capital, he fell in with the then queen of Dominica, a
Madame Ouvernard, a Carib of pure blood, who in her time of youth and
beauty had been the mistress of an English governor of St. Kitts. When
Labat saw her she was a hundred years old with a family of children and
grandchildren. She was a grand old lady, unclothed almost absolutely,
bent double, so that under ordinary circumstances nothing of her face
could be seen. Labat, however, presented her with a couple of bottles of
eau de vie, under the influence of which she lifted up to him a pair of
still brilliant eyes and a fair mouthful of teeth. They did very well
together, and on parting they exchanged presents in Homeric fashion, she
loading him with baskets of fruit, he giving a box in return full of
pins and needles, knives and scissors.

Labat was a student of languages before philology had become a science.
He discovered from the language of the Caribs that they were North
American Indians. They called themselves _Banari_, which meant 'come
from over sea.' Their dialect was almost identical with what he had
heard spoken in Florida. They were cannibals, but of a peculiar kind.
Human flesh was not their ordinary food; but they 'boucanned' or dried
the limbs of distinguished enemies whom they had killed in, battle