rs and stripes conspicuously flying. We
have had some differences of late with the Hayti authorities, and the
satisfaction which we asked for having been refused or delayed, a
man-of-war had been sent to ask redress in more peremptory terms. The
town lay under her guns; the president's ships, which she might perhaps
have seized as a security, had been taken out of sight into shallow
water, where she could not follow them. The Americans have no particular
rights in Hayti, and are as little liked as we are, but they are feared,
and they do not allow any business of a serious kind to go on in those
waters without knowing what it is about. Perhaps the president's admiral
of the station being an American may have had something to do with their
presence. Anyway, there the two ships were lying when I came up from
below, their hulks and spars outlined picturesquely against the steep
wooded shores. The air was hot and steamy; fishing vessels with white
sails were drifting slowly about the glassy water. Except for the heat
and a black officer of the customs in uniform, and his boat and black
crew alongside, I could have believed myself off Moelde or some similar
Norwegian town, so like everything seemed, even to the colour of the
houses.

We were to stay some hours. After breakfast we landed. I had seen
Jacmel, and therefore thought myself prepared for the worst which I
should find. Jacmel was an outlying symptom; Port au Prince was the
central ulcer. Long before we came to shore there came off whiffs, not
of drains as at Havana, but of active dirt fermenting in the sunlight.
Calling our handkerchiefs to our help and looking to our feet carefully,
we stepped up upon the quay and walked forward as judiciously as we
could. With the help of stones we crossed a shallow ditch, where rotten
fish, vegetables, and other articles were lying about promiscuously, and
we came on what did duty for a grand parade.

We were in a Paris of the gutter, with boulevards and _places_, _fiacres_
and crimson parasols. The boulevards were littered with the refuse of
the houses and were foul as pigsties, and the ladies under the parasols
were picking their way along them in Parisian boots and silk dresses. I
saw a _fiacre_ broken down in a black pool out of which a blacker
ladyship was scrambling. Fever breeds so prodigally in that pestilential
squalor that 40,000 people were estimated to have died of it in a single
year. There were shops and stores and