Ma
Bonne.
375
—"C'est drôle, ça !" (It is queer, that !) She cannot understand it. — " And the little manmaille in Martinique, Cyrillia— touttpiti, piti,—don't they talk creole ?" —"Oui; mais toutt moune ka pâle negue: ça facile." (Yes ; but anybody can talk negro—that is easy to learn.) XII.
room has no furniture in it : the Martinique bonne lives as simply and as rudely as a domestic animal. One thin mattress covered with a sheet, and elevated from the floor only by a léfant, forms her bed. The léfant, or " elephant," is composed of two' thick square pieces of coarse hard mattress stuffed with shavings, and placed end to end. Cyrillia has a good pillow, however,—bourré épi flêches-canne,—filled with the plumes of the sugar-cane. A cheap trunk with broken hinges contains her modest little wardrobe : a few mouchoirs, or kerchiefs, used for head-dresses, a spare douillette, or long robe, and some tattered linen. Still she is always clean, neat, fresh-looking. I see a pair of sandals in the corner,—such as the women of the country sometimes wear—wooden soles with a leather band for the instep, and two little straps ; but she never puts them on. Fastened to the wall are two French prints—lithographs : one representing Victor Hugo's Esmeralda in prison with her pet goat ; the other, Lamartine's Laurence with her fawn. Both are very old and stained and bitten b y the bête-à-ciseau, a species of lepisma, which destroys books and papers, and everything it can find exposed. On a shelf are two bottles,—one filled with holy water ; another with tafia camphrée (camphor dissolved in tafia), which is Cyrillia's sole remedy for colds, fevers, headaches—all maladies not of a very fatal description. There are also a little woollen monkey, about three inches h i g h — t h e CYRILLIA'S
29