Les Blanchisseuses.
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the last-comer. There is always a great laugh at the last to leave the channel : they ask her if she has not forgotten " to lock up the river."
—"Ou fend lapbte lariviè, chè—anh ?" —"Ah! oui, chè!—moin fèmé y, ou tanne?—moin ni laclé-à !" (Oh yes, dear. I've got the key !)
I locked it up,—you hear ?—
But there are days and weeks when they do not sing,— times of want or of plague, when the silence of the valley is broken only by the sound of linen beaten upon the rocks, and the great voice of the Roxelane, which will sing on when the city itself shall have ceased to be, just as it sang one hundred thousand years ago. . . . " Why do they not sing to-day ?" I once asked during the summer of 1 8 8 7 , — a year of pestilence. "Yo ka
pensé toutt lanmizè yo,—toutt lapeineyo," I was answered. (They are thinking of all their trouble, all their misery.) Yet in all seasons, while youth and strength stay with them, they work on in wind and sun, mist and rain, washing the linen of the living and the dead,—white wraps for the newly born, white robes for the bride, white shrouds for them that pass into the Great Silence. And the torrent that wears away the ribs of the perpetual hills wears away their lives,— sometimes slowly, slowly as black basalt is worn,—sometimes suddenly,— in the twinkling of an eye. For a strange danger ever menaces the blanchisseuse,—the treachery of the stream ! . . . Watch them working, and observe how often they turn their eyes to the high north-east, to look at Pelée. Pelée gives them warning betimes. When all is sunny in St. Pierre, and the harbor lies blue as lapis-lazuli, there may be mighty rains in the region of the great woods and the valleys of the higher peaks ; and thin streams swell to raging floods which burst suddenly from the altitudes, rolling down