“No? Pray, why, my dear sir?—I have tried to” “Hold your tongue, my good boy.”
“Cease, rude Boreas, blustering railer,
List old ladies o’er your tea,
At description Tom’s a tailor,
When he is compared to me.
Tooral looral loo.”
“Attend—brevity is the soul of wit,—ahem. Listen how I shall crush all your lengthy yam into an eggshell. ‘The Bight of Leogane is a horseshoe—Cape St Nicholas is the caulker on the northern heel Cape Tiberoon, the ditto on the south—Port-au-Prince is the tip at the toe towards the east—Conaives, Leogane, Petit Trouve, &c. &c. &c. are the nails, and the Island of Gonave is the frog.’ Now every human being who knows that a horse has four legs and a tail—of course this includes all the human race, excepting tailors and sailors—must understand this at once; it is palpable and plain, although no man could have put it so perspicuously, excepting my friend William Cobbettt or myself. By the way, speaking of horses, that blood thing of the old Baron’s nearly gave you your quietus t’other day, Tom. Why will you always pass the flank of a horse in place of going ahead of him, to use your own phrase? Never ride near a led horse on passing when you can help it; give him a wide berth, or clap the groom’s corpus between you and his heels; and never, never go near the croup of any quadruped bigger than a cat, for even a cow’s is inconvenient, when you can by any possibility help it.”
I laughed—“Well, well, my dear sir—but you undervalue my equestrian capability somewhat too, for I do pretend to know that a horse has four legs and a tail.”
There was no pleasing Aaron this morning, I saw.
“Then, Tummas, my man, you know a deuced deal more than I do. As for the tail, conceditur—but devilish few horses have four legs nowadays, take my word for it. However, here comes Transom; I am off to have a lounge with him, and I will finish the veterinary lecture at some more convenient season. Tol lol de rol.”—Exit singing.
The morning after this I went ashore at daylight, and, guided by the sound of military music, proceeded to the Place Republicain, or square before President Petion’s palaces where I found eight regiments of foot under arms, with their bands playing, and in the act of defiling before General Boyer who commanded the arrondissement. This was the garrison of Port-au-Prince, but neither the personal appearance of the troops, nor their appointments, were at all equal to those of King Henry’s well dressed and well drilled cohorts that we saw at Conaives. The President’s guards were certainly fine men, and a squadron of dismounted cavalry, in splendid blue uniforms, with scarlet trowsers richly laced, might have vied with the elite of Nap’s own, barring the black faces. But the materiel of the other regiments was not superfine, as M. Boyer, before whom they were defiling, might have said.
I went to breakfast with Mr S——, one of the English merchants of the place, a kind and most hospitable man; and under his guidance, the Captain, Mr Bang, and I, proceeded afterwards to call on Petion. Christophe, or King Henry, had some time before retired from the siege of Port-au-Prince, and we found the town in a very miserable state. Many of the houses were injured from shot; the President’s palace, for instance, was perforated in several places, which had not been repaired. In the antechamber you could see the blue heavens through the shot holes in the roof.—“Next time I come to court, Tom,” said Mr Bang, “I will bring an umbrella.” Turning out of the parade, we passed through a rickety, unpainted open gate, in a wall about six feet high; the space beyond was an open green or grass-plot, parched and burned up by the sun, with a common fowl here and there fluttering and hotching in the hole she had scratched in the and soil; but there was neither sentry nor servant to be seen, nor any of the usual pomp and circumstance about a great man’s dwelling. Presently we were in front of a long, low, one story building, with a flight of steps leading up into an entrance hall, furnished with several gaudy sofas, and half-a-dozen chairs with a plain wooden floor, on which a slight approach to the usual West India polish had been attempted, but mightily behind the elegant domiciles of my Kingston friends in this respect. In the centre of this room stood three young officers, fair mulattoes, with their plumed cocked-hats in their hands, and dressed very handsomely in French uniforms; and it always struck me as curious, that men who hated the very name of Frenchman, as the devil hates holy water, should copy all the customs and manners of the detested people so closely. I may mention here once for all, that Petion’s officers, who, generally speaking, were all men of colour, and not negroes, were as much superior in education, and, I fear I must say, in intellect, as they certainly were in personal appearance, to the black officers of King Henry, as his soldiery were superior to those of the neighbouring black republic.
“Ah, Monsieur S——, comment vous portez vous? je suis bien aise de vous voir,” said one of the young officers; “how are you, how have you been?”
“Vous devenez tout a fait rare,” quoth a second. “Le President will be delighted to see you. Why, he says he thought you must have been dead, and les messieurs La....”