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 316 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 conver sation. 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 |