University of Virginia Library

XXII.

… BY nine o'clock, as a general rule, St. Pierre becomes silent: everyone here retires early and rises

with the sun. But sometimes, when the night is exceptionally warm, people continue to sit at their doors and chat until a far later hour; and on such a night one may hear and see curious things, in this period of plague. …

It is certainly singular that while the howling of a dog at night has no ghastly signification here (nobody ever pays the least attention to the sound, however hideous), the moaning and screaming of cats is believed to bode death; and in these times folks never appear to feel too sleepy to rise at any hour and drive them away when they begin their cries. … To-night—a night so oppressive that all but the sick are sitting up—almost a panic is created in our street by a screaming of cats;—and long after the creatures have been hunted out of sight and hearing, everybody who has a relative ill with the prevailing malady continues to discuss the omen with terror.

… Then I observe a colored child standing bare-footed in the moonlight, with her little round arms uplifted and hands joined above her head. A more graceful little figure it would be hard to find as she appears thus posed; but, all unconsciously, she is violating another superstition by this very attitude; and the angry mother shrieks:—

—"Ti manmaille-là!—tiré lanmain-ou assous tête-ou, foute! pisse moin encó là! … Espéré moin allé lazarett avant metté lanmain conm ça!" (Child, take down your hands from your head … because I am here yet! Wait till I go to the lazaretto before you put up your hands like that!)

For it was the savage, natural, primitive gesture of mourning,— of great despair.

… Then all begin to compare their misfortunes, to relate their miseries;—they say grotesque things,—even make jests about their troubles. One declares:—

—"Si moin té ka venne chapeau, à fóce moin ni malhè,

toutt manman sé fai yche yo sans tête." (I have that ill-luck, that if I were selling hats all the mothers would have children without heads!)

—Those who sit at their doors, I observe, do not sit, a rule, upon the steps, even when these are of wood. There is a superstition which checks such a practice. "Si ou assise assous pas-lapóte, ou ké pouend doulè toutt moune." (If you sit upon the door-step, you will take the pain of all who pass by.)