II.

D'ABORD VOUS GUETTÉ POUX DE BOIS MANGÉ BOU

TEILLE, CROQUEZ CALEBASSE VOUS HAUT. When you see the wood-louse eat the bottles, hang your calabash high.

The former is an invocation of charity toward those who fall into temptation, and this suggests precautions to be taken against falling again. If you find yourself inclined to any vice, try and put yourself beyond its reach, avoid exposing yourself to its temptations, eschew society and amusements which weaken your power or disposition to resist it, following in this respect the counsel of Niebuhr in the choice of books, that it is best not to read books in which you make the acquaintance of the devil.

And again, whatever is precious to you, be it your sense of God's presence with those who try to do His will, your respect for His word, your faith in prayer, hang it high; that is, cultivate a respect for it not only in yourself, but in others; place it where no

enemy can see it without looking up, nor

reach it without ascending.

Here is another of the same family:

III.

PRAVETTE PAS JAMAIN GAGNÉ RAISON DEVANT

POULE.

The cockroach never wins its cause when the chicken is judge. This is the same plea for the weak against the strong and aggressive which the immortal slave of Phrygia so forcibly presented in his fables of "The Wolf and the Lamb" and "The Council of Animals to stay the Pestilence" some five and twenty centuries ago.1

'Hens feed on cockroaches in the West Indies to such an extent as to make the yolks of their eggs pale, thin and at times, more or less bitter, just as our hen's eggs are affected in the "locust year" by a similar course of feeding. This is the type slave proverb of the West Indies because it expresses, more strongly than any other, the relation of weakness and dependence on one side, and force and tyranny on the other which existed between the slaves and their masters. It is the commonest negro proverb in Martinique. When, in 1845, the chamber of deputies in France was discussing the question of slavery in the colonies, and proposed a plan by which a slave could redeem himself by an appeal to the colonial magis

IV.

NE QUE COUTEAU CONNAIT QUIOR À YAMME.

It is only the knife that knows the heart of the yam. Cultivate a healthy distrust of appearances; profit by the lessons taught through trials and temptations which, like a knife penetrate to the very heart, putting all artifice and conventionality at defiance, and bring to light qualities of character before unsuspected.

In this latter sense the Haytians use an

trates, Rouillat de Cussac, a Martinique lawyer, told the deputies that in this case the slave would repeat to them leur proverb le plus habituel. "Ravet pas teni raison devant poulé." It has always been in use in Trinidad, which was both a French and Spanish island before it was English. The negroes of Jamaica and the other British West India islands say: "Cockroach never in de right before fowl." "Cockroach eber so drunk, him no walk past fowl yard." "When cockroach make dance, him no ax fowl." If some similar proverb has never been current among the slaves of the southern states, it is because of the comparative mildness of slavery there and because their multiplied contact with the whites of the south, in consequence of the latter being the most numerous, wore away negro peculiarities and prevented the growth and adoption of special proverbs.― Hunt.

other proverb, which is probably of French

origin:

V.

CÉ LHER VENT CA VENTER MOUNE CA QUÈr la

PEAU POULE.

It is when the wind is blowing that we see the skin of the fowl.

VI.

CÉ SOULIERS TOUT-SEULE SAVENT SI BAS TINI

TROUS.

Shoes alone know if the stockings have holes.

1

There are vices and infirmities known only to the most intimate; there are crimes known only to their authors, and there are weaknesses known only to one's familiars. Nemo scit præter me, said St Jerome, ubi soceus me permit. It is the sea only which knows the bottom of the ship, say the Efik tribes of Western Africa. There is another proverb quite current, I am told, in the French Antilles, though I never chanced to hear it, that A man is not to be known till he takes a wife. This

'Nobody but myself knows where the shoe pinches.

might be taken as merely a variety of the two preceding proverbs, without an explication of its origin.

The buccaneers of San Domingo were pretty much a law unto themselves, acknowledging only an odd jumble of conventions upon which they had from time to time agreed. They had, in a manner, shaken off the yoke of religion, and thought they did much, in not entirely forgetting the God of their fathers. Had they been perpetuated until this time, the third or fourth generation of them would have had as little religion as the Caffres and Hottentots of Africa. They even laid aside their surnames, and assumed their nicknames or martial names, most of which have continued in their families to this day. Many of them, however, on their marrying, which seldom happened till they turned planters, took care to have their real surnames inserted in the marriage contract; and this gave occasion to the proverb, that A man is not to be known till he marries.1

'Jeffreys, Description of the Island of Hispaniola, p. 23.