at all satisfactory to the colonel; one yellow
woman dead, a few prisoners, and some smoldering ruins--surely there was
no profit in such business.

Reclining at ease, he allowed himself to admire his uniform, a splendid
creation of blue and gold which had put him to much pains and expense.
It had arrived from Port au Prince barely in time to be of service in
the campaign. As for the shoes, they were not so satisfactory. Shoes of
any sort, in fact, cramped Colonel Petithomme Laguerre's feet, and were
refinements of fashion to which he had never fully accustomed himself.
He wore them religiously, in public, for a colonel who would be a
general must observe the niceties of military deportment, even in the
Haytian army, but now he kicked them off and exposed his naked yellow
soles gratefully.

On three sides of the clearing were thickets of guava and coffee trees,
long since gone wild. A ruined wall along the beach road, a pair of
bleaching gate-posts, a moldering house foundation, showed that this had
once been the site of a considerable estate.

These mute testimonials to the glories of the French occupation are
common in Hayti, but since the blacks rose under Toussaint l'Ouverture
they have been steadily disappearing; the greedy fingers of the jungle
have destroyed them bit by bit; what were once farms and gardens are now
thickets and groves; in place of stately houses there are now nothing
but miserable hovels. Cities of brick and stone have been replaced by
squalid villages of board and corrugated iron, peopled by a
shrill-voiced, quarreling race over which, in grim mockery, floats the
banner of the Black Republic inscribed with the motto, "Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity."

Once Hayti was called the "Jewel of the Antilles" and boasted its
"Little Paris of the West," but when the black men rose to power it
became a place of evil reputation, a land behind a veil, where all
things are possible and most things come to pass. In place of monastery
bells there sounds the midnight mutter of voodoo drums; the priest has
been succeeded by the "papaloi," the worship of the Virgin has changed
to that of the serpent. Instead of the sacramental bread and wine men
drink the blood of the white cock, and, so it is whispered, eat the
flesh of "the goat without horns."

As he picked his teeth, Colonel Petithomme Laguerre turned his eyes to
the right, peering idly into the shadows of a tamarind-tree, the
branches of which overtoppe