evening to midnight, the open square to hidden obscure corners, the dancers to bacchanals; the gay, frank music to a weird chanting, subtly imitative of the yearning sighing of the wind that precedes the tropical storm; rising and swelling to the full explosion of the tempest. Among the African slaves, under any applications or assumptions of Christianity, there was always Voudou superstition, lying dormant, with their past, but in the early days of slavery there was little chance or opportunity to practise the rites of Voudouism, as they were called. Their formal introduction in the city can be plausibly traced to the immigrant St. Domingo slaves. The accessories and ceremonies followed the description given of Voudou meetings in the West Indian Islands. There was the same secrecy of place and meeting, the altar, serpent, and the official king and queen; the latter with much profusion of red in her dress, the oath to the serpent; a string of barbarous epithets and penalties, the suppliants to the serpent coming up, one by one, with their prayers, always and ever for love or revenge, the king with his hand on the serpent, receiving from it the trembling of the body which he communicates to the queen, and which she passes on to all in the room; the trembling increasing to movement; the movement, to contortions of the body, convulsions, frenzy, ecstacies, the queen ever leading; the low humming song rising louder and louder; the dancers whirling around, faster and faster, screaming, waving their red handkerchiefs, tearing off their garments, biting their flesh, falling down delirious, exhausted, pell mell, blind, inebriated, in the hot dense darkness;—when the sheer lassitude of consciousness returns with daylight, retaining but one thing firmly
