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But not so fast, lest the inexperienced reader get too hasty and optimistic a notion of wind-wafted travel. A schooner is a most romantic means of conveyance -when there is something to fill her sails. I can imagine no greater punishment for American impatience than to be sentenced to lie aimlessly tossing through the hereafter in tropical doldrums where even the fish scorn to bite. Evidently the winds within the gaping jaws of Haiti are as erratic as the untamable race that peoples its mountainous shores.

All

However, let us avoid exaggeration. We did move every now and then, sometimes in the right direction, occasionally at a spanking pace that sent the blue waters outward in two white furrows along our bows. Yet the mountainous ridges on each hand crept past with incredible leisureliness. through the second night the tramp of hurrying bare feet and the stentorian "French" of the officers sounded about the deck cots we had preferred to the still-luxurious cabins below, and by sunrise we had covered nearly twenty miles since sunset! Gonave Island, with its alligator snout, floated on our starboard all that day with a persistency which suggested we were towing it along with us. Brown and seeming almost bare at this distance, it showed no other signs of life than a few languid patches of smoke, which the mulatto cabin-boy explained as "Burn 'em off an' then make 'em grow." It was well that he had picked up a fair command of English somewhere, for the mere fact that we both prided ourselves on the fluency of our French did not help us in any appreciable degree to carry on conversation with the black crew.. The youthful officers, with that quick adaptability which we like to think of as American, had mastered their new calling even to the extent of acquiring that strange series of noises which is dignified in the French West Indies with the name of "creole," but it would never have been recognized even as a foster-child on Parisian boulevards.

Before the third day waned, our goal, Port-au-Prince, was dimly to be seen with the assistance of our glasses, a tiny, whitish, triangular speck which

seemed to stand upright at the base of the hazy mountain-wall stretching across the world ahead. The wind, too, took on a new life, but it blew squarely in our faces, as if bent on refusing us admittance to our destination. The shore we were seeking receded into the dusk, and the men of endless patience which sailing-vessels seem to breed settled down to battle through another night, with little hope of doing more than avoid retreat. We were rewarded, however, with another of those marvelous West Indian sunsets which only a super-artist could hope to picture. Ragged handfuls of clouds, like the scattered fleece of the golden-brown vicuña, hung motionless against the background of a pink-and-blue-streaked sky, which faded through all possible shades to the blackening indigo of the once more limitless sea.

How long the winds might have prolonged our journey there is no knowing. Out of the black night behind us there appeared what seemed a pulsating star, which gradually grew to unstar-like size and brilliancy. Excitement broke out among the three white mariners. One of them snatched an electric lamp and flashed a few letters of the Morse code into the darkness. They were answered by similar winkings on the arc of the approaching star. This shifted its course and bore down

upon us. The captain caught up a megaphone and bellowed into the howling wind. The answer came back in no celestial tongue, but in a strangely familiar and earthly dialect: "Hello! That you, Louie? Tow? Sure. Got a line or shall I pass you one?" A searchlight suddenly revealed the navy of Haiti like a star in the center of the stage; a submarine-chaser snorted alongside us with American brevity; our sails dropped with a run, and a few moments later we were scudding through the waves into the very teeth of the gale. When I awoke from my next nap, L'Indépendance was asleep at anchor in a placid little cove.

Port-au-Prince is not, as it appears from far out in the bay, heaped up at the base of a mountain-wall, but stretches leisurely up a gentle, but constant, slope that turns mountainous well

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behind the city. Off and on through the night we had heard the muffled beating of tom-toms, or some equally artistic instrument, and occasionally a care-free burst of laughter that could come only from negro throats had floated to us across the water. The first rays of day showed us a stone's-throw from a shore, which the swift tropical dawn disclosed as far denser in greenery than a Cuban coast. The city lay three miles away across the curving bay. Two slender wireless poles and the stack of a more distant sugar-mill stood out against the mountain-range behind, while all else. still hovered in the haze of night. Then, bit by bit, almost swiftly, the details of the town began to appear, like a photographic plate in the developer. A creamcolored, two-towered cathedral usurped the center of the picture; whitish, boxlike houses spotted the slope irregularly all about it, and the completed development showed scores of little hovels scattered through the dense greenery far up the hillsides and along the curving shore. Then all at once a bugle sounded, an American bugle playing the old familiar reveille, and full day popped forth as suddenly as if the strident notes had summoned the world to activity.

Two blacks, manning the schooner's tender, set us ashore in the Haitian "navy-yard," a slender wooden pier

along which were moored three American submarine-chasers. An encampment of marines eyed us wonderingly from the doors of their tents and wooden buildings, beyond which a gateway gave us entrance to a thoroughly Haitian scene. A stony country road, flanked by a toy railway line, was almost thronged with the children of Ham. Negro women, with huge bundles of every conceivable content on their heads, pattered past with an easy-going, yet graceful, carriage. Others sat sidewise on top of assorted loads that half hid the lopeared donkeys beneath them. Red bandanas and turbans of other gay colors showed beneath absurdly broad palmleaf hats. Black feet, with the remnants of a slipper balancing on the toes of each, waved with the pace of the diminutive animals. The riders could scarcely have been called well dressed, but they were immaculate compared with the throngs of foot travelers. A few scattered patches of rags, dirty beyond description, hung about the black bodies they made no serious effort to conceal. Men in straggly Napoleon III beards clutched every few steps at the shreds which posed as trousers. Stark-naked

urchins pattered along through the dust; more of them scampered about under the palm-trees. Bare feet were as general as African features. More than one group sidled crabwise to the edge of

the road as we advanced and gazed behind them with a startled expression at the strange sound made by our shod feet. Scores of the most primitive huts imaginable, many of them leaning at what seemed a precarious angle, lined the way. Before almost all of them stood a little "shop," a few horizontal sticks

little handfuls of tiny red beans laid at regular intervals along a banana-leaf, similar heaps of unroasted coffee, bundles of fagots, tied with strips of leaf, that could easily have gone into a coatpocket. Now and again some black ragamuffin paused to open negotiations with the lolling shopkeepers, who carried on the transaction, if possible, from where they lay, rising to their feet only when the heat of the bargaining demanded it. The smallness of each purchase was amusing, as well as indicative of Haitian poverty. One orange, a single banana, a measureful of a coarse, reddish meal tinier than the smallest glass of a bartender's paraphernalia, were the usual amounts, and the pewter coins that exchanged owners were seldom of the value of a whole cent. With rare exceptions the purchasers at once wolfed what they had bought as they pattered on down the road.

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The commander of the Haitian Navy and his mate, enlisted men in the American Navy and Marine Corps respectively, but first lieutenants in the Gendarmerie d'Haiti

raised off the ground by slender poles and shaded by a cluster of brown palmleaves. Vacant-faced negro men and women, none of them boasting a real garment, tended the establishments by squatting or lolling in the patches of shade which the early morning sun cast well out into the roadway. The stock in trade of the best of them would not have filled a market-basket. A cluster of bananas; a few oranges, small, but yellower than those of Cuba; bedraggledlooking alligator- pears; dust-covered loaves of bread, no larger than biscuits, made up the most imposing arrays. Many of the "merchants" had not advanced to the stick-counter stage, but spread their wares on the ground

For all their poverty, the inhabitants seemed to be frankly happy at life. They had the playfulness of children, with frequent howls of full-throated laughter; they seemed no more self-conscious at the super-tattered state of their garments than were the ambling, over-laden donkeys at the ludicrous patchiness of their trappings. That lack of the sense of personal dignity characteristic of the African came to their rescue in the abjectness of their condition. For they were African, as thoroughly so as the depths of the Congo. We had strolled for an hour, and reached the very edge of the city itself, before we met not a white man, but the first face that showed any admixture of Caucasian blood. Compared with this callousfooted throng the hodgepodge of Cuban complexions seemed almost European.

As we neared the town, a train as primitive as the scene about us clattered round a bend in the tunnel of vegetation, the front of its first-model engine swinging like the trunk of an excited elephant. The four open, wooden cars that swayed and screamed along behind it were densely packed with passengers,

yet even here there was not a white face. The diminutive tender was piled high with cordwood little larger than fagots, and the immense, squatty smokestack was spitting red coals over all the surrounding landscape. As the train passed, the negro women along the road sprang with a flurry of their ragged skirts upon the track and fell to picking up what we took to be coins scattered by some inexplicably generous passenger. Closer investigation showed that they were snatching up live coals with which to light the little brown clay pipes which give them a flitting resemblance to Irish peasants.

A lower-class market was in full swing in a dust-carpeted patch of ground on the city waterfront. Here the wares were more varied than in the roadside "shops", but sold in the same minute portions. American safetymatches were offered not by the box, but in bundles of six matches each, tied with strips of leaf. Here were "butchershops," consisting of a wooden troughful of meat, which

owed its preservation to a thorough cooking, and was sold by the shred and consumed on the spot. Scrawny, black old hags, who had tramped who knows how many miles over mountain-trails with an ox-load of oranges or coarse tubers on their heads, squatted here all the morning selling a pennyworth of their wares at a time, the whole totaling perhaps forty cents, to be squandered for some product of civilization, and carried home in

imitation of the uniform of our own marines, but as African of soul beneath it as the most naked of his fellow-citizens, strutted back and forth through the throngs of clamorous bargainers. Now and again, when a group grew too large for his liking, he charged into it, waving a long stick and striking viciously at the legs and backs of all within reach, irrespective of sex or age. Far from fighting back or even showing resentment, the childlike blacks fled before him, often with shrieks of laughter. Ours were the only white faces within the inclosure, yet we were given passage everywhere with an unostentatious consideration that in less primitive societies would be called extreme courtesy.

The American residents of Port-auPrince complain that visitors of scribbling propensities have given too much space to its comic-opera aspect. It is hard to avoid the temptation. The ridiculous is constantly forcing itself into the foreground, innocently unaware of distracting attention from the more

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The crew of L'Indépendance -and the entire enlisted personnel of the Navy of Haiti

the same laborious fashion. The minority of the women venders had come on donkeys and were frank in impressing upon their more lowly sisters the aristocracy which this sign of wealth and leisure conferred upon them. A native gendarme, dressed in a cheap-looking

serious background. For there is such a background, and one which should in all fairness be sketched into any picture of Haiti which makes pretense of being true to life. If there has been a constant tendency to leave it out, it is probably due to the fact that the average

wanderer over the face of the earth finds most "interesting" the incongruous and the ludicrous.

To close our eyes, then, for the moment to the more obvious details, the capital of the Black Republic is by no means the misplaced African village which common report would indicate. Its principal streets are excellently paved with asphalt; scores of automobiles honk their way through its seething streams of black humanity. Even along the waterfront the principles of sanitation are enforced. Barefooted "white wings," distinguished by immense green hats of woven palm-leaves worn on top of their personal headgear, are constantly sweeping the city with their primitive bundle-of-grass brooms. A railroad, incredibly old-fashioned, to be sure, but accommodating a crowded traffic for all that, runs through the heart of town and connects it with others considerable distances away in both directions. An excellent electric light service covers all the city. Its shops make a more or less successful effort to ape their Parisian prototypes; its business offices by no means all succumb to the tropical temptation to sleep through the principal hours of the day. The French left it a legacy of wide streets, though failing, of course, to bequeath it adequate sidewalks. Its architecture is a surprise to the traveler arriving from Cuba; it would be far less so to one who came direct from Key West. Wooden houses with sloping roofs are the almost general rule, thinwalled structures with huge slatted doors and windows, and built as open as possible to every breeze that blows, as befits the climate. There are neither red tiles, strangely tinted walls, nor Moorish rejas and patios to attract the eye.

Indeed, there is little or nothing in the average street vista to arouse the admiration, though there is a certain cause for amusement in the strange juxtaposition of the most primitive African reed huts with the attempts of Paris-educated mulattoes to ape, with improvements of their own, their favorite French châteaux.

Only two buildings in Port-au-Prince --one might perhaps say in all Haitiboast window-glass.

One is the large One is the large

and rather imposing cathedral, light yellow both outside and within, and flooded with the aggressive tropical sunshine in a way that leaves it none of the "dim and mystic light" befitting such places of worship. The other is the unfinished, snow-white presidential palace, larger and more sumptuous than our own White House. The cathedral looks down upon the blue harbor across a great open square unadorned with a single sprig of vegetation; the palace squats in the vast sun-scorched Champs de Mars, equally bare except for a Napoleonic statue of Dessalines, his telltale complexion disguised by the kindly bronze, and attended by a modest and deeply tanned Venus of Melos. The absence of trees in the public squares gives assistance to the wooden houses in proving the city no offshoot of Spanish civilization. The tale runs that the Champs de Mars was once well wooded until a former president ordered it cleared of all possible lurking-places for assassins.

But Port-au-Prince is by no means unshaded. The better residential part up beyond the glaring parade-ground makes full use of the gorgeous tropical vegetation. Here almost every house is hidden away in its grove of palms, mangos, breadfruit, and a score of other perennial trees and flowering bushes, ranging all the way from our Northern roses to the pale-yellow of blooming cotton-trees and enormous masses of the lavender-purple bougainvillea, crowd their way in between the tree-trunks. Oranges, bananas, and the pear-shaped grape-fruit of Haiti hang almost within reach from one's window; alligatorpears in their season may be had for the flinging of a club; and he who cares to climb high enough can quench his thirst with the cool water of the green cocoanut. The dwellings here are spacious and airy, their ceilings almost double the height of our own, and if they lack some of the conveniences considered indispensable in the North, they have instead splendid swimming-pools and, in many cases, such a view of the lower city, the intensely blue bay, and the wrinkled brown ranges of the southern peninsula as would make up for a scarcity of the stereotyped comforts.

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