The neglected and broken pavement of the road that remained as a monument to the long-departed French governors of Haiti was almost hidden by the rank, luxurious growth of tropical plants on either side of it. As seen from the hillside, where the man was sitting, it seemed an impracticable path for even the slowly moving donkeys which here and there crawled between the overhanging vegetation. The man looked neither to the right nor to the left, but throwing back his head, at intervals of possibly fifteen minutes, as if addressing the blazing sun above, bawled out at the top of his voice: “Mother Sybella! Mother Sybella! May I approach?” The man was a mulatto, though with features markedly of the negro type; around his head he wore a much soiled white handkerchief. His body was fairly bursting out of a tight-fitting blue coat of military fashion, adorned with immense brass buttons. His bare feet and long thin shanks appeared below dirty duck trousers that once had been white. There evidently was something awe-inspiring about the name that he shouted even though the rest of the words were unintelligible to the natives. The man shouted his request in the English language; the natives of Haiti used a jargon of French, English and native dialect difficult to understand and impossible to describe or reproduce in writing. If, when the man called, a native were passing along the highway, as sometimes happened, he would spring forward so violently as to endanger the safety of the huge basket of fruit or vegetables that he carried upon his head, and glancing over his shoulder with dread in his distended, white and rolling eyes, would break into a run and speed forward as if in mortal terror. The man had just given utterance to a louder howl than usual when he felt the grip of bony claw-like fingers on his shoulder; with one unearthly yell he sprang to his feet, turned and fell upon his knees before the figure that so silently had stolen to his side. “Has the yellow dog brought a bone to his mother?” The words were spoken in the patois of the native Haitians with which the man was familiar. The speaker was a living, animated but mummified black crone of a woman. She leaned upon a staff made of three human thigh bones, joined firmly together by wire. Her fleshless fingers looked like the talons of a vulture as she gripped the top of her horrid prop and bent forward toward the man. Her age seemed incalculable in decades; centuries appeared to have passed since she was born. The wrinkles in her face were as gashes in black and aged parchment, so deep were they. The skin over her toothless jaws was so drawn and stretched by untold time that the very hinges of the jaw were plainly traced; in cavernous, inky holes dug deep beneath the retreating forehead sparkled, like points of flame, eyes so bright and glittering that sparks of electric fire shot forth in the gaze by which she transfixed the groveling wretch at her feet.