Her birth is announced with antique formality in the colonial papers, and duly registered in the _Archives de la Marine_. She is christened in the twilight of some colonial baptistery, where silhouettes of palm-heads quiver behind stained-glass windows; and receives those half-dozen names--names of angels, or saints, alternated with names of ancestors--by which every white creole child is ushered into the world. Then some comely black or brown woman, dazzlingly robed in bright colors, and covered with barbaric jewelry, carries her on a silken cushion from house to house that all of family kin may kiss her. Always through the recollections of her childhood there will smile back to her the memory of that kind swart face,--the face of her black nurse, of her _da_. It is the _da_ who bathes her, feeds her, dresses her, lulls her to sleep with song: doubtless for a time she believes the dark woman her mother. It is the _da_ who first takes her out into the beautiful world of the tropics,--shows her the mighty azure circle of the sea, and the coming and going of the ships, and the peaks with their circling clouds, and the whispering gold of cane-fields, and the palms, and the jewel-feathered humming birds. It is the black nurse who first teaches her to kiss,--to utter the words _'Manman,' 'Da,' 'Papoute,'_ to express her infant thoughts in the softest cooing speech uttered by human lips,--the creole tongue. It is the _da_ also who first thrills her child-fancy into blossom with stories of the impossible, and who stimulates her musical sense by teaching her strange songs,--melodies borne with slavery into the Indies from Senegal or the Coast of Gold.