memory of a charming hour I passed alone one night on my host's verandah when the village slept and the household had retired. In the solitary window of every negro cabin burned the "jumbo light" to remind the ghosts of the dead, and the spirits of the night that friends were sleeping there. The moon hung high over the shimmering waves of the Caribbean Sea, the wash of whose waters on the beach alone broke the stillness of the night. Innumerable stars, of a brilliancy surpassing those of our northern skies in midwinter, studded the great dome and lent a surpassing beauty to the night. For the first time I understood why the East gave birth to astronomy, astrology and sabaism. As night deepened weird and fantastic flashes of lightning appeared in almost every part of the heavens. These waves of light came chiefly from the south-east, and north-east, and intermittently illumined the whole firmament. The lightning was never forked, and no thunder accompanied the display. At times stars broke away from their settings, resembling a train of fantastic lights. The atmosphere was luminously clear, so that objects afar off seemed near, even unto contact. The loveliness of the tropical day was rivalled by the matchless brilliancy of the starlit night. Amid the whisper of winds and the gleaming of stars I noticed the air was charged with the faint odour of sulphur which escaped from the gaping wound in the side of the mountain. From the crater of this solfatara rose the steam of boiling water which rested . over the royal crest, a cloud shifting and tremulous. Away to my left was the gorge thirty feet deep, dug by the torrents which came down from the mountain in the fateful hurricane of 1899, and between it and me reposed the sleeping village. CHAPTER VI GUADELOUPE-MOTHER OF THE PINE-APPLE Like silver in the sunshine, I beheld The imperial isle and when I saw her beauty -Madoc, I, 6. NOWHERE on earth is there a fairer island than Guadeloupe and nowhere have I found a happier or more approachable people. Here the luscious and palatable pine-apple was first found, and here too the creole, the quadroon, and the octoroon attain the perfection of Southern beauty. Since the annihilation of St. Pierre, Basse-Terre, the island capital is admitted to be the most beautiful city of the West Indies. Behind the town is La Soufrière towering up to a romantic summit, where on a bright day one may see the volcanic smoke covering like a huge pall the imperial crest. To windward is the island of Marie Gallante, floating like a misty cloud thirty miles away. Between Guadeloupe and Dominica sleep the Saintes-isles of beauty. "Where the children are fair as the roses they twine, But it is of that terrible snake, the deadly fer-delance, that I would now write, and before commencing I ought to dip my pen in vitriol. I was surprised to learn from a gentleman to whom I bore a letter of introduction, that the mountains of Guadeloupe, like those of Martinique and St. Lucia, were infested with this hideous reptile. The fer-de-lance is full of venomous cunning, and an ugly customer to meet anywhere, and at any time. When in St. Lucia, I was told he never strikes without provocation. "You must never approach him abruptly," said Mr. James Flett, of Castries, to me, "if so you are sure to pay for your rashness, because the instinct of self-protection dominates every animal, and the snake to defend himself makes the intruder feel the deadly effects of his fangs." "Never approach him abruptly?" Just so! but how is one to know even of his presence, when the ugly monster, when in repose, resembles a decayed branch in colour and deadness? Schomburgh, in his "Travels in Guiana," records how the fer-de-lance, coiled by the forest path, allowed fourteen persons to pass him, unnoticed by any one of the party, then, rising, he fastened his poisonous fangs in the neck of Schomburgh's young Indian wife, who fled to her husband's arms, where she died in great agony. He is the deadliest snake in the West Indies, and perhaps in the world. There is no known antidote to his bite, and once in the grip of his venomous fangs, the victim abandons hope. He is not found alive in any zoological garden in the world. This rat-tailed monster when full grown is eight feet long, with a very ugly, flat, triangular head, a heavy jaw, and an eye that gives to it a look of malevolence, craft and cunning. He will not get out of your way, and if you touch him or step on him you will never do it again. A few months before I came here Ti-Joseph and Remy, sons of Roland Dufreneau, went into the woods early one morning to hunt agouti, a tailless, slender-limbed animal a little larger than our rabbit. Ti-Joseph, the elder of the two, stopped to fasten his leather gaiters or spats. When rising from his knee his brother Remy, who was crossing a fallen tree, gave a cry of alarm, staggered, then reeled as in a stupour, and fell. When Ti-Joseph rushed to his side a fer-de-lance was hanging from his brother's throat. Ti-Joseph killed the snake, then turned to help his brother, but he was already writhing in the agony of death. In 1871, in the parish of St. Francis, twenty-one men and boys were done to death by this hideous reptile. The following year the mongoose was turned loose in the woods, and at once he began to make war on the fer-de-lance. Now, what is a mongoose? Well, the mongoose is a native of Ceylon, India, and parts of Africa, with the body and head of a weasel and the tail of a lizard. Where the snake can go, the mongoose can follow him. His manner of attack is peculiar. When the snake and the mongoose meet in the woods or in the open the fer-de-lance "strips" for the fight by forming a triple coil, with his vicious head swaying eight or ten inches above his body. Cunning as the reptile notoriously is, his cunning is no match for the strategy of the mongoose. When the snake is "set" |