profane with reverence for their splendour.

I drew the attention of my men to the wonderful sight.

"They are stars!" they replied contemptuously; "Have you never seen stars
before?"

It was indeed difficult to enter into conversation on any subject with
them without having an ardent desire to strangle the lot, they were so
ignorantly offensive. I was thankful I had the sense always to go about
unarmed, or I am certain some of them would have paid somewhat dearly for
their impertinence. I was glad, too, that I never felt the weight of
loneliness, as days and days would go by without my saying a word to
them, barring perhaps a shout in camp to bring my breakfast, lunch, or
dinner.

What was even worse than entering into conversation with them was to
listen--one could not help it, they shouted so loudly all the time--to
the conversation among themselves. We will not refer to the choice
language they used, so inexplicably sacrilegious and indecorous that it
would have set on edge the teeth of the coarsest specimens of humanity;
but the subject--I say subject in the singular, mark you, for alas! there
was only one subject--discussed in all its phases perhaps, but only one
single subject--assassination. The accounts of different murders, in some
of which the men boasted they had taken part, were nightly repeated in
their minutest details to the assembled crowd--myself excluded--sitting
around the fire, while the _feijao_--beans, so loved by them--were being
stewed for hours and hours in a cauldron.

There was the story of one murder of which one of the men was
particularly proud, in which he reproduced the facial expression as well
as the smothered shrieks of the horrified victim. He gave a vivid
description of how the blood squirted out like a fountain from the
jugular vein of the throat as it was being severed. That story--most
graphically narrated, I admit--had taken the fancy of that cruel crowd.
Almost every evening, during the entire time those men were with me, many
long months, I heard that story repeated amid roars of laughter from the
company. Murder--when applied to others--was evidently for them a great
joke!

Inconsiderate to a degree, they would get up and sing at the top of their
voices in the middle of the night and keep everybody awake while the
_feijao_ was stewing. It took hours and hours before those awful black
beans had boiled sufficiently to be edible, and the man who acted as
cook had to sit