In this latter island it exists to this day, and has found votaries among the whites. A recent French traveller—Piron—describes a fearful scene which he witnessed in the house of a lady whom he never would have suspected of any connection with so monstrous a sect. A naked white girl acted as a voodoo priestess, wrought up to frenzy by dances and incantations that followed the sacrifice of a white and a black hen. A serpent, trained to its part, and acted on by the music, coiled round the limbs of the girl, its motions studied by the votaries dancing around or standing to watch its contortions. The spectator fled at last in horror when the poor girl fell writhing in an epileptic fit.[4] Footnote 4: Piron, _L’Ile de Cuba_, pp. 48-52. While France held St. Domingo and Louisiana the intercourse between the two colonies was constant, and voodooism took root on the banks of the Mississippi soon after its settlement. The early historian of Louisiana, Le Page du Pratz, says: “The negroes are very superstitious and attached to their prejudices and to charms which they call grisgris. These should not be taken from them or spoken about; for they would think themselves ruined, were they deprived of them. The old negro slaves soon disabuse them.”[5] These old negroes were scarcely, it will be confessed, apostles to convert idolaters. In fact, their influence extended only to inducing the new-comers to practise their rites and use the symbols in secrecy. Footnote 5: _Hist. de la Louisiane_, i. p. 335. Le Page du Pratz himself, in defeating a negro plot to massacre the colonists at New Orleans as the Indians had done at Natchez, found that they attributed their defeat to his being a devil—that is, possessing one more powerful than their own. The voodoo rites have been kept up in Louisiana from the commencement, and the power exercised by the priests and priestesses of this horrible creed is very great. Working in secret, with all the terrors of mystery and threats of bodily harm, it is just suited to the negro mind, and has spread over much of the South. As in Cuba and St. Domingo, the white children in many cases learn of it from their negro nurses, and the weak, as they grow up, never shake off its hold on their imagination. Human sacrifices are certainly offered in their infamous rites, and the escape of an old negro doomed to the sacrificial altar drew down upon the voodoos the police of New Orleans only a few years ago. The Abbé Domenech[6]—whom we should hesitate to cite, were not his accounts here in conformity with numerous others—represents voodooism as having not only spread through Texas, but into Mexico where, in a depraved border community, its horrid rites and secret poisonings are carried on. His details as to the mode of worship in New Orleans—the nudity, the use of serpents, the dances—correspond with the accounts given from Cuba. Reports from Mobile attest its existence there with similar features. Footnote 6: