STRANGER THAN FICTION

It was a perfect West Indian day.  My friend the notary and I were crossing the island by a wonderful road which wound up through tropic forest to the clouds, and thence looped down again, through gold-green slopes of cane, and scenery amazing of violet and blue and ghost-gray peaks, to the roaring coast of the trade winds.  All the morning we had been ascending,—­walking after our carriage, most of the time, for the sake of the brave little mule;—­and the sea had been climbing behind us till it looked like a monstrous wall of blue, pansy-blue, under the ever heightening horizon.  The heat was like the heat of a vapor-bath, but the air was good to breathe with its tropical odor,—­an odor made up of smells of strange saps, queer spicy scents of mould, exhalations of aromatic decay.  Moreover, the views were glimpses of Paradise; and it was a joy to watch the torrents roaring down their gorges under shadows of tree-fern and bamboo.

My friend stopped the carriage before a gateway set into a hedge full of flowers that looked like pink-and-white butterflies.  “I have to make a call here,” he said;—­“come in with me.”  We dismounted, and he knocked on the gate with the butt of his whip.  Within, at the end of a shady garden, I could see the porch of a planter’s house; beyond were rows of cocoa palms, and glimpses of yellowing cane.  Presently a negro, wearing only a pair of canvas trousers and a great straw hat, came hobbling to open the gate,—­followed by a multitude, an astonishing multitude, of chippering chickens.  Under the shadow of that huge straw hat I could not see the negro’s face; but I noticed that his limbs and body were strangely shrunken,—­looked as if withered to the bone.  A weirder creature I had never beheld; and I wondered at his following of chickens.

“Eh!” exclaimed the notary, “your chickens are as lively as ever!...  I want to see Madame Floran.”

“Moin k[’e] di,” the goblin responded huskily, in his patois; and he limped on before us, all the chickens hopping and cheeping at his withered heels.

“That fellow,” my friend observed, “was bitten by a fer-de-lance about eight or nine years ago.  He got cured, or at least half-cured, in some extraordinary way; but ever since then he has been a skeleton.  See how he limps!”

The skeleton passed out of sight behind the house, and we waited a while at the front porch.  Then a m[’e]tisse—­turbaned in wasp colors, and robed in iris colors, and wonderful to behold—­came to tell us that Madame hoped we would rest ourselves in the garden, as the house was very warm.  Chairs and a little table were then set for us in a shady place, and the m[’e]tisse brought out lemons, sugar-syrup, a bottle of the clear plantation rum that smells like apple juice, and ice-cold water in a dobanne of thick red clay.  My friend prepared the refreshments; and then our hostess came to greet us, and to sit with us,—­a nice old lady with hair like newly minted silver.  I had never seen a smile sweeter than that with which she bade us welcome; and I wondered whether she could ever have been more charming in her Creole girlhood than she now appeared,—­with her kindly wrinkles, and argent hair, and frank, black, sparkling eyes....