Adam and Eve,
came side by side and cut away its clusters, as we sever the golden
burden of the banana from its stem; then, like a banana which has borne
its fruit, it was razed to the ground and made way for a newer, brighter
growth. I believe it would set every tooth on edge should I go by there
now,--now that I have heard the story,--and see the old site covered by
the "Shoo-fly Coffee-house." Pleasanter far to close my eyes and call to
view the unpretentious portals of the old cafe, with her children--for
such those exiles seem to me--dragging their rocking-chairs out, and
sitting in their wonted group under the long, out-reaching eaves which
shaded the banquette of the Rue Burgundy.

It was in 1835 that the Cafe des Exiles was, as one might say, in full
blossom. Old M. D'Hemecourt, father of Pauline and host of the cafe,
himself a refugee from San Domingo, was the cause--at least the human
cause--of its opening. As its white-curtained, glazed doors expanded,
emitting a little puff of his own cigarette smoke, it was like the
bursting of catalpa blossoms, and the exiles came like bees, pushing
into the tiny room to sip its rich variety of tropical sirups, its
lemonades, its orangeades, its orgeats, its barley-waters, and its
outlandish wines, while they talked of dear home--that is to say, of
Barbadoes, of Martinique, of San Domingo, and of Cuba.

There were Pedro and Benigno, and Fernandez and Francisco, and Benito.
Benito was a tall, swarthy man, with immense gray moustachios, and hair
as harsh as tropical grass and gray as ashes. When he could spare his
cigarette from his lips, he would tell you in a cavernous voice, and
with a wrinkled smile that he was "a-t-thorty-seveng."

There was Martinez of San Domingo, yellow as a canary, always sitting
with one leg curled under him and holding the back of his head in his
knitted fingers against the back of his rocking-chair. Father, mother,
brother, sisters, all, had been massacred in the struggle of '21 and
'22; he alone was left to tell the tale, and told it often, with that
strange, infantile insensibility to the solemnity of his bereavement so
peculiar to Latin people.

But, besides these, and many who need no mention, there were two in
particular, around whom all the story of the Cafe des Exiles, of old M.
D'Hemecourt and of Pauline, turns as on a double centre. First, Manuel
Mazaro, whose small, restless eyes were as black and bright as those of
a mouse, whose l