Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/139

Rh To-day is Sunday, and Mr. C. has done me the favour of allowing me to see the negroes of the plantation dance for an hour in the forenoon. In an ordinary way, they never dance during the dry season, la secca; they are, however, very glad to do it, if they can only get the opportunity, spite of their laborious work both night and day. I already hear the African drum beating its peculiar, distinct, and lively measures, and after the baptism of a little negro child, the dancing is to begin.

I enjoy myself very much with the kind family here, in which there seems to prevail a great deal of mutual affection, and somewhat of that cheerfulness which existed amongst us when we were so large a family altogether at home. Here are four sons and three daughters, who play and quarrel playfully one with another at all hours of the day, and the youngest, a pretty lad, is so childishly full of fun that he befools me to play with him.

In the morning and the evening I go out on my solitary rambles in the neighbourhood, generally accompanied by three large bloodhounds, which I cannot get rid of, but which are gentle as lambs, and lie down perfectly quiet around me whenever I sit down to sketch a tree or any remarkable object which takes my fancy; and it is perhaps as well for me that I have them with me, because there are said to be runaway negro slaves roving about on the island, and the dogs guard me from any surprise of this sort. These animals are so trained that, whilst they are perfectly gentle towards white people, they are dangerous to the blacks, and the blacks are afraid of them.

I have here sketched two remarkable trees; the one a beautiful ceiba in perfect health and magnificence, and a magnificent tree it really is; the other a ceiba in the arms of its terrible murderess or mistress, or both in one. In this tree one may see the parasite grasping the trunk with two gigantic hands, and, as it were, strangling it in its