But they were at once volatile and of a languid frame, which could not long repel the enticements of wine and passionate excess, liable to petty rages, incapable of concentration, with no power of remembering anything but a benefit, lavish fawners, but not hearty haters, easily persuaded, and easily repenting of everything but hospitality.  No abuse of that put the drop of savage blood in motion, till the Spaniards began to regard their women with indiscriminate desire.  That was the first outrage for which a Spanish life had to atone.  But neither treachery nor cruelty lurked beneath their flowery ways; it was sullen despair which broke their gayety, brief spasms of wrath followed by melancholy.  But they could not keep their ideas well enough in hand to lay a plot.

These graceful children, with their curious prognostics of a Creole temper, were not devoid of religion.  The Creator has set none of His children in the sun, to work or play, without keeping this hold upon them.  They defer to this restraint, with motions more or less instinctive, but can never, in their wildest gambols, break entirely loose.  It is not easy to separate the real beliefs of the Haytians from the conjectures of Catholic and Jewish observers.  The former were interested to discover analogies which would make it appear that they had been foreordained to conversion; the latter were infested with the notion that they were descendants of one of the Lost Tribes.  What, for instance, can be made of the assertion that the Haytian Supreme had a mother?  The natives were gentle enough to love such a conception, and to be pleased with the Catholic presentation of it, but this is the only proof we have that they originated it.  It would be pleasant to believe that they referred, in some dim way, their sense of the womanly quality back to the great Source of Life.

But the Hebrew coincidences were as eagerly sought.[L] If a cacique remarked to Columbus that he thought good men would be transported to a place of delights, and bad men to a foul and dismal place where darkness reigned, it was deemed to be a reminiscence of Sheol and a later Jewish idea of Paradise.  If Anacaona, the charming wife of Caonabo, came forth to meet the Adelantado, at the head of thirty maidens of her household, dancing and singing their native songs, and waving branches of the palm-tree, a variety of Old and New Testament pictures occurred to the mind.  Their hospitality and pertinacious sheltering of fugitives was another Oriental trait.  But, above all, the horrible oppression to which the Spaniards subjected them, the indignities and sufferings heaped upon them, were considered to fulfil the divine curse which rested upon Jews!  What a choice morsel of theology is this!

[Footnote L:  Consult a curious book, The Ten Tribes of Israel historically identified with the Aborigines of the Western Hemisphere.  By Mrs. Simon. 1836.]