POOR devil! He was an escaped convict from French Guiana—haggard, half-starved, barefooted; his shirt torn as if to show his torn heart, his trousers ragged; bareheaded, blue eyes, a mat of brown hair, and a neat mustache and beard, reminiscent of the Parisian boulevards. He didn’t look half so ferocious as his black, British gorilla of a guard, who dragged him on our boat, and later transferred him to the train bound for Georgetown, Demerara, to languish in jail till the French mail steamer arrived to take him back captive to Cayenne. I took pity on him, gave him some fruit, chocolate and money, wished him a bon voyage, and was sorry I couldn’t give him his liberty as well. French Guiana is a penal colony, a prison of 35,000 square miles, bounded by Dutch Guiana, Brazil and the Atlantic ocean. Out of a population of some 40,000, 10,000 are convicts. While there are exports of balata and phosphates, the principal ones are gold, cocoa, hides, rosewood and rosewood oil, the last shipped to France as a substitute for attar of roses. But the glitter of the gold is dimmed by the shadow of the prison, and above the fragrance of the rosewood rises the stench of political putridity, convict crime and corruption. From her earliest history, Cayenne has furnished an inspired chapter for the Devil’s Bible, written with finger of fire in ink of blood. In the first of the seventeenth century the settlers not only had before them the interesting fate of being massacred and devoured by the cannibal Indians, but a providential blessing in the form of their mad commander, Sieur de Bretigny, who, not satisfied with torturing the 400 colonists with gibbet, gallows and wheel, amused himself by instituting pleasures called “Purgatory” and “Hell,” in which he forced them to relate even their dreams as to a father confessor; if he were displeased, he maltreated and killed them. The next batch of settlers mutinied en route from France, and on arriving here so angered the Indians by enslaving and plundering them that the natives forced them to take refuge in a fort where Famine and Disease were the red man’s best allies.