A FOB EST IDYLL. 221 



their love was hopeless, and discovered, the two young foolish 

 thinf;^s, not havinii as is too common in France the fear of 

 God before their eyes, could think of no better resource than 

 to shut themselves up with a pan of lighted charcoal, and so 

 go they knew not whither. The poor girl went and was 

 found dead. But the boy recovered ; and was punished with 

 twenty years of Cayenne; and here he was now, on a sort of 

 ticket-of-leave, cooking for his livelihood. I talked a while 

 with him, cheered him with some compliments about the 

 Parisians, and so forth, dear to the Frenchman's heart what 

 else was there to say ? and so left him, not without the fancy 

 that, if he had liad but such an education as the middle 

 classes in Paris have not, there were the makings of a man in 

 that keen eye, large jaw, sharp chin. " The very fellow," said 

 some one, '' to have been a first-rate Zouave." AYell : perhaps 

 he was a better man, even as he was, than as a Zouave. 



And so we rode away again, and through Valencia, and 

 through San Josef, weary and happy, back to Port of 

 Spain. 



I would gladly, had I been able, have gone further due 

 westward, into the forests which hide the river Oropuche, that 

 I might have visited the scene of a certain two years' Idyll, 

 which was enacted in them some forty years and more ago. 



In 1827, cacao fell to so low a price (two dollars per cwt.) 

 that it w^as no longer worth cultivating ; and the head of the 



