their worship directly to him, but to inferior deities, called zemes, a kind of messengers or mediators. Each cacique, each family, and each individual, had a particular zemi as a tutelary or protecting genius; whose image, generally of a hideous form, was placed about their houses, carved on their furniture, and sometimes bound to their foreheads when they went to battle. They believed their zemes to be transferable, with all their beneficial powers; they, therefore, often stole them from each other, and, when the Spaniards arrived, hid them away, lest they should be taken by the strangers.

They believed that these zemes presided over every object in nature. Some had sway over the elements, causing steril or abundant years, sending whirlwinds and tempests of rain and thunder, or sweet and temperate breezes, and prolific showers. Some governed the seas and forests, the springs and fountains, like the nereids, the dryads, and satyrs of antiquity. They gave success in hunting and fishing; they guided the mountain streams into safe channels, leading them to meander peacefully through the plains; or, if incensed, they caused them to burst forth into floods and torrents, inundating and laying waste the valleys.

The Indians were well acquainted with the medicinal properties of trees and vegetables. Their butios, or priests, acted as physicians, curing diseases with simples, but making use of many mysterious rites; chanting and burning a light in the chamber of the patient, and pretending to exorcise the malady, and to send it to the sea or to the mountain. They practised also many deceptions, making the idols to

speak with oracular voice, to enforce the orders of the caciques.

Once a year each cacique held a festival in honour of his zemi, when his subjects formed a procession to the temple; the married men and women decorated with their most precious ornaments; the young females entirely naked, carrying baskets of cakes, ornamented with flowers, and singing as they advanced, while the cacique beat time on an Indian drum. After the cakes had been offered to the zemi they were broken and distributed among the people, to be preserved in their houses as charms against all adverse accidents. The young females then danced to the cadence of songs in praise of their deities, and of the heroic actions of their ancient caciques; and the whole ceremony concluded by a grand invocation to the zemi to watch over and protect the nation.

The natives believed that their island of Hayti was the earliest part of creation, and that the sun and moon issued out of one of its caverns to give light to the universe. This cavern still exists near Cape François, and the hole in the roof may still be seen from whence the Indians believed the sun and moon had sallied forth to take their places in the sky. It was consecrated as a kind of temple; two idols were placed in it, and the walls were decorated with green branches. In times of great drought the natives made pilgrimages and processions to it, with songs and dances, and offerings of fruit and flowers.

They ascribed to another cavern the origin of the human race, believing that the large men issued forth from a great aperture, but the little men from a little cranny. For a long time they dared venture

from the cavern only in the night, for the sight of the sun was fatal to them, producing wonderful transformations. One of their number having lingered on a river's bank, where he was fishing, until the sun had risen, was turned into a bird of melodious note, which yearly, about the time of his transformation, is heard singing plaintively in the night, bewailing his misfortune. This is the same bird which Columbus mistook for a nightingale.

When the human race at length emerged from the cave, they for some time wandered about disconsolately without females, until coming near a small lake, they beheld certain animals among the branches of the trees, which proved to be women. On attempting to catch them, however, they were found to be as slippery as eels, so that it was impossible to hold them, until they employed certain men whose hands had been rendered rough by a kind of leprosy. These succeeded in securing four of them; and from these slippery females the world was peopled.

Like most savage nations, they had a tradition concerning the deluge, equally fanciful with the preceding. They said that there once lived in the island a mighty cacique, whose only son conspiring against him, he slew him. He afterwards preserved his bones in a gourd, as was the custom of the natives with the remains of their friends. On a subsequent day, the cacique and his wife opened the gourd to contemplate the bones of their son, when, to their surprise, several fish leaped out. Upon this the discreet cacique closed the gourd and placed it on the top of his hut, boasting that he had the sea shut up within it, and could have fish whenever he pleased. Four brothers, however, children of the

same birth, and curious intermeddlers, hearing of this gourd, came during the absence of the cacique to peep into it. In their carelessness they suffered it to fall upon the ground, where it was dashed to pieces; when, lo! to their astonishment and dismay, there issued forth a mighty flood, with dolphins and sharks, and tumbling porpoises, and great spouting whales; and the water spread until it overflowed the earth, and formed the ocean, leaving only the tops of the mountains uncovered, which are the present islands.

They had singular modes of treating the dying and the dead. When the life of a cacique was despaired of, they strangled him out of a principle of respect, rather than suffer him to die like the vulgar. Common people, in like situation, were extended in their hammocks, bread and water placed beside them, and they were then abandoned to die in solitude. Sometimes they were carried to the cacique, and if he permitted them the distinction, they were strangled. The body of the deceased was sometimes consumed with fire in his habitation; sometimes the bones were retained, or the head, or a limb, and treasured up among the family reliques. After the death of a cacique, his body was opened, dried at a fire, and preserved.

They had confused notions of the existence of the soul when separated from the body, and believed in apparitions of the deceased. They had an idea that the spirits of good men after death were reunited to the spirits of those they had most loved, and to those of their ancestors: they were transported to a happy region, generally supposed to be near a lake, in the beautiful province of Xaragua, in the western

part of the island. Here they lived in shady and blooming bowers, with lovely females, and banqueted on delicious fruits.

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The dances to which the natives were so addicted were not mere idle pastimes, but were often ceremonials of a religious and mystic nature. In these were typified their historical events and their jected enterprises, whether of war or hunting. They were performed to the chant of certain metres and ballads handed down from generation to generation; some of a sacred character, containing their notions of theology and their religious fables; others heroic and historic, rehearsing the deeds of their ancestors. These rhymes they called areytos, and sang them to the accompaniment of rude timbrels made from the shells of certain fishes, or to the sound of a drum made from a hollow tree.

The natives appeared to the Spaniards to be an idle and improvident race, and indifferent to most of the objects of human anxiety and toil. They were impatient of all kinds of labour, scarcely giving themselves the trouble to cultivate the yuca root, the maize, and the sweet potatoe, which formed their main articles of food. They loitered away existence under the shade of their trees, or amusing themselves occasionally with their games and dances.

In fact, they were destitute of all powerful motives to toil, being free from most of those wants which doom mankind, in civilized life, and in less genial climes, to incessant labour. In the soft region of the vega, the circling seasons brought each its store of fruits, and while some were gathered in full maturity, others were ripening on the boughs,