Page:Cerise, a tale of the last century (IA cerisetaleoflast00whytrich).pdf/270

 He had a step noiseless and sure as a cat; she never heard him coming, but started with a loud scream when she felt his hand on her shoulder, and incontinently began to cry.

"What have you got there, Fleurette?" asked the overseer, sternly. "Bring it out at once, and show it up!"

"Nothing, Massa," answered Fleurette, of course, though she was sobbing all the time. "It only Aunt Rosalie's piccaninny, I take him in please, just now, to his mammy, out of the wind."

There was but such a light breath of air as kept the temperature below actual suffocation.

"Wind! nonsense!" exclaimed Bartoletti, perspiring and exasperated. "Aunt Rosalie's child was in the baby-*yard half an hour ago; here, let me look at him!" and the overseer snatched up Fleurette's apron to discover a pair of plump black hands, clasped over a well-fattened turkey, cleaned, plucked, and ready for the pot.

The girl laughed through her tears. "You funny man, Signor!" said she, archly, yet with a gleam of alarm in her wild black eyes; "you no believe only when you see. Piccaninny gone in wash-tub long since; Fleurette talkee trash, trash; dis lilly turkey fed on plantation at Maria Gralante; good father give um to Fleurette a-cause dis nigger say 'Ave' right through, and spit so at Mumbo-Jumbo."

This story was less credible than the last, inasmuch as the adjoining plantation of Maria Galante, cultivated by a few Jesuit priests, although in a thriving condition, and capable of producing the finest poultry reared, was more than an hour's walk from where they stood, and it was impossible that Fleurette could have been absent so long from her duties at that period of the day. So Bartoletti, placing his hand in his waistcoat, pulled out a certain roll, which the slaves called his "black book," and inserted Fleurette's name therein for corporal punishment to the amount of stripes awarded for the crime of theft.

It was a common action enough; scarce a day passed, scarce even an hour, without the production of this black book by the overseer, and a torrent of entreaties, couched in the mingled jargon of French, Spanish, and British, I have endeavoured to render through the conventional negro