University of Virginia Library

XXV.

… IN most of the old stone houses you will occasionally see spiders of terrifying size,—measuring across perhaps as much as six inches from the tip of one out-stretched leg to the tip of its opposite fellow, as they cling to the wall. I never heard of anyone being bitten by them; and among the poor it is deemed unlucky to injure or drive them away. … But early this morning Yzore swept her house clean, and ejected through door-way quite a host of these monster insects. Manm-Robert is quite dismayed:—

—"Fesis-Maïa!—ou 'lè malhè encó pou fai ça, chè?" (You want to have still more bad luck, that you do such a thing?)

And Yzore answers:—

—"Toutt moune içitt pa ni yon sou!—gouôs conm ça fil zagrignin, et moin pa menm mangé! Epi laverette encó. … Moin couè toutt ça ka póté malhè!" (No one here has a sou!—heaps of cobwebs like that, and nothing to eat yet; and the verette into the bargain … I think those things bring bad luck.)

—"Ah! you have not eaten yet!" cries Manm-Robert. "Vini épi moin!" (Come with me!)

And Yzore—already feeling a little remorse for her treatment of the spiders—murmurs apologetically as she crosses over to Manm-Robert's little shop:—"Moin pa tchoué yo; moin chassé yo—ké vini encó." (I did not kill them; I only put them out;—they will come back again.)

But long afterwards, Manm-Robert remarked to me that they never went back. …