sional exchange of shot and shell at
long range between the works on shore and those which the Unionists had
erected and held upon the neighboring islands and marshes, nothing was
done, and for nearly a year Fournier experienced the irksomeness of
routine duty in a wretchedly arranged and appointed military hospital.
Nevertheless, the time was not wholly wasted. From a planter fleeing
from the anarchy of civil war he procured a native African slave, one of
the shipload brought over a few years before in the Wanderer, the last
slave-ship that put into an American harbor. This man he made his
body-servant and kept always near him, partly to study him, but chiefly
to secure his complete mental and moral thraldom. An almost unqualified
savage, Fournier avoided systematiclly everything that would tend to
civilize him. He taught him many things that were convenient in his
higher mode of life, and taught him well, but of the great principles of
civilization he strove to keep him in ignorance; and more, he so
confused and distorted the few gleams of light that had reached that
darkened soul that they made its gloom only the more hideous and
profound. He wanted a man altogether savage, mentally, morally and
physically. Instead of teaching him English or French, he learned from
him many words of his own rude native tongue, and communicated with him
as much as possible in that alone, aided by gesture, in which, like all
Frenchmen, he possessed marvelous facility of expression. In the
unexplored back-country of Africa the negro had been a prince, and
Fournier bade him look forward to the time when he would return and
rule. He always addressed him by his African name and title in his own
tongue. He took him into the wards of his hospital, and taught him to be
useful at surgical operations and to care for the instruments, that he
might become familiar with them and with the sight of blood, which at
first maddened him. Once he gave him a drug that made his head throb,
and then bled him, with almost instant relief. He affected an interest
in the amulets which hung at his neck, and besought him to give him one
to wear. He committed to his care, with expressions of the greatest
solicitude, a strong box, brass bound and carefully locked, which he
told him contained his god, a most potent and cruel deity, who would,
however, when it pleased him, give back the life of a dead man for
_blood_. This box contained a silver cup, with a thermometer