unloading of the vessels, as well as by
passengers and vehicles, a violent clamor, loud, shrill, and
deafening, as if from some distant, monstrous forest.

Boitelle would stop with stained eyes, wide-open mouth, laughing and
enraptured, showing his teeth to the captive cockatoos, who kept
nodding their white or yellow top-knots towards the glaring red of his
breeches and the copper buckle of his belt. When he found a bird that
could talk, he put questions to it, and if it happened at the time to
be disposed to reply and to hold a conversation with him, he would
remain there till nightfall, filled with gayety and contentment. He
also found heaps of fun in looking at the monkeys, and could conceive
no greater luxury for a rich man than to possess these animals, just
like cats and dogs. This kind of taste for the exotic he had in his
blood, as people have a taste for the chase, or for medicine, or for
the priesthood. He could not keep himself, every time the gates of the
barracks opened, from going back to the quay, as if he felt himself
drawn towards it by an irresistible longing.

Now, on one occasion, having stopped almost in ecstacy before an
enormous araruna, which was swelling out its plumes, bending forward,
and bridling up again as if making the court-curtseys of parrot-land,
he saw the door of a little tavern adjoining the bird-dealer's shop
opening, and his attention was attracted by a young negress, with a
silk kerchief tied round her head, sweeping into the street the
rubbish and the sand of the establishment.

Boitelle's attention was soon divided between the bird and the woman,
and he really could not tell which of these two beings he contemplated
with the greater astonishment and delight.

The negress, having got rid of the sweepings of the tavern, raised her
eyes, and, in her turn, was dazzled by the soldier's uniform. There
she stood facing him with her broom in her hands as if she were
carrying arms for him, while the araruna continued making curtseys.
Now at the end of a few seconds the soldier began to get embarrassed
by this attention, and he walked away gingerly so as not to present
the appearance of beating a retreat.

But he came back. Almost every day he passed in front of the Colonial
tavern, and often he could distinguish through the window-panes the
figure of the little black-skinned maid filling out "bocks" or glasses
of brandy for the sailors of the port. Frequently, too, she would come