Before the approach of such a visitation animals manifest the same signs of terror they display prior to an earthquake. Cattle assemble together, stamp, and roar; sea-birds fly to the interior; fowl seek the nearest crevice they can hide in. Then, while the sky is yet dear, begins the breaking of the sea; then darkness comes, and after it the wind.
II
The legend of "Missié Bon" had prepared me to hear without surprise the details of a still more singular tradition,—that of Father Labat.... I was returning from a mountain ramble with my guide, by way of the Ajoupa-Bouillon road;—the sun had gone down; there remained only a blood-red glow in the west, against which the silhouettes of the hills took a velvety blackness indescribably soft; and stars were beginning to twinkle out everywhere through the violet. Suddenly I noticed on the flank of a neighboring morne—which I remembered by day as an apparently uninhabitable wilderness of bamboos, tree-ferns, and balisiers—a swiftly moving point of yellow light. My guide had observed it simultaneously;—he crossed himself, and exclaimed:
"Moinka ka couè c'est fanal Pè Lobatt!" (I believe it is the lantern of Père Labat.)
"Does he live there?" I innocently inquired.
"Live there?—why he has been dead hundreds of years!... Ouill! you never heard of Pè Labatt?"...
"Not the same who wrote a book about Martinique?"
"Yes,—himself.... They say he comes back at night. Ask mother about him;—she knows."...
... I questioned old Théréza as soon as we reached home; and she told me all she knew about "Pè Labatt." I found that the father had left a reputation far more wide-spread than the recollection of "Missié Bon,"—that his memory had created, in fact, the most impressive legend in all Martinique folk-lore.
"Whether you really saw Pè Labatt's lantern," said old Théréza, "I do not know;—there are a great many queer lights to be seen after nightfall among these mornes. Some are zombi-fires; and some are lanterns carried by living men; and some are lights burning in ajoupas so high up that you can only see a gleam coming through the trees now and then. It is not everybody who sees the lantern of Pè Labatt; and it is not good-luck to see it.