It is a curious trait that the negro has a shy dislike of monkeys; he has an uneasy feeling that the whites imagine that there is no great difference between a very ugly negro (and there are ugly ones) and a handsome gorilla. The first evening I went to the theatre in Port-au-Prince, I was started by the exclamation of my companion, “Qui est ce monstre africain?” I turned, and saw in the President’s box a perfect horror; but use reconciled me even to this man. An Italian once came to the capital with a dancing-monkey. Crowds followed him everywhere. One day he stopped before a German merchant’s, and a fair little girl came out. The monkey would not dance, whereon the disappointed child said to her father in Creole, “Faut-il batte petit nègue là.” The mob were furious at the mistake, and the father was too glad to hurry in with his child to escape a shower of stones. There are still many negroes in Hayti who were born in Africa, being principally the remains of certain cargoes of slaves which the English cruisers captured and landed among their free brethren. One whom I knew had been taken, then freed by an English officer, sent to England, and educated at the expense of Government. When of age he was asked what he would desire to do. He replied, “I should wish to go to Hayti.” When I knew him he was an old man, and had risen to occupy the position of Minister of Justice. The principal trouble to the female negro mind is her unfortunate wool. How she envies her more favoured sisters their long tresses! how she tries to draw out each fibre, and endeavours to make something of it by carefully platting it with false hair! Even the smallest negro servant will spend hours in oiling, brushing, and tending this poor crop, whose greatest length will only compass three or four inches. It is only when women are more than half white that the wool turns into hair, and even then it has sometimes a suspicious crispy wave, which, however, looks well. Of late years chignons have been a regular importation from France, and the little negresses are delighted with them. The negroes have a very curious habit of talking aloud to themselves. You will hear them in the streets or in the country roads carrying on apparently a long conversation, repeating all they have said or intended to say on a certain occasion, and in a very loud voice; every other sentence is varied by a grunt or guttural ejaculation. Sometimes they are evidently excited, and are enacting a violent quarrel. They are apparently oblivious that all their remarks are heard, or may be; they are delighted to take so many people into their confidence. It is a general observation that in nine cases out of ten the subject of which they are treating is money.