BQT
B59

It was my fortune to pass a portion of the winter of 1854 in the island of Hayti, while it was still under the imperial sway of the late Faustin I. My own country, at that time, was beginning to be seriously occupied with the slavery problem, and one of my objects. in visiting a place then difficult of access, and little frequented by tourists, was to inform myself personally of the condition and prospects of this struggling little empire which had successfully defied one of the best armies of the first Napoleon, and which for more than half a century had managed to maintain its political independence without the

alliance or even the sympathy of any foreign

state.

It is no part of my present purpose to set forth the results of my observations in Hayti farther than to give some account of the most interesting, if not the only truly indigenous and original product of the Haytian civilization of which I was fortunate enough to find any trace. As a stranger in cordial sympathy with the Haytian in his determination to maintain the political independence of his country, I naturally sought to bring away with me all the evidence I could find there, of the capacity of the African race for self-government.

The Haytian depends for his livelihood. exclusively upon the products of the soil, the air, and the water. He manufactures nothing for export. With the richest sugar. lands he imports all his fine sugar; he smokes cigars made of Kentucky tobacco, and eats salt fish cured in New England. Though I searched carefully I found nothing to bear away with me as a trophy of Hay

tian civilization that was wrought with Haytian hands, or was the fruit of Haytian industry.

What I did find, however, that was essentially Haytian, and as much the specialty of this island as the De Brie cheese, or the Valenciennes lace, or the Jersey cows, or Florentine mosaics are the specialties of the places of which they bear the name, were the proverbs with which the creole population are accustomed to garnish their conversation.

Proverbial forms of expression are used quite freely by all classes, but most abound in the mouths of the humble and unlettered peasants, who not only can not read themselves, but who probably never had an ancestor who could. To them they hold the place of books and libraries, in which they hoard up and minister to each other the wisdom and experience of ages.

Many of their proverbs struck me as so novel and so finely flavored with the soil of the island, or with the customs of its pecu

liar and simple-minded people, that I was tempted to make a memorandum of them. My interest in the subject attracting the attention of several intelligent Haytians of my acquaintance, they were good enough to assist me in enlarging my collection.

In this work I was under special obligations to Mr. B. P. Hunt, of Philadelphia, then the head of a large commercial house in Port-au-Prince, who to a general culture of high order added a familiarity with the history of Hayti and with the peculiarities of its people which is possessed by no other person to my knowledge. His collection of books relating to the Antilles is the most complete in this country, perhaps in the world. He has been good enough to increase my manifold obligations to him by looking over the following collection and making some notes the value of which I have taken the liberty of sharing with my readers.

A majority of the proverbs in common. use among the Haytians had evidently come from the Old World, many, of course, from

France not the least valuable relic of French domination in the island - while others, and to me the more interesting portion, were obviously indigenous, and such as reflected the sentiments likely to be uppermost in the minds of people who were or had been bondmen. Were any apology needed for inviting the reader's attention to these specimens of the proverbial literature of the Haytians (if the colloquialisms of a people who neither read nor write may be called a literature), it will be found, I trust, in the fact that they are the highest expression of the purely intellectual activity of this people that exists, and are unquestionably the most interesting and characteristic production of their beautiful but very unfortunate island.

Victor Hugo, in one of his youthful productions, which, though now pretty much forgotten, predicted his literary eminence,1 seized very successfully this feature of Haytian civilization. It has also attracted the