“A beautiful country and full of interest, if, forsooth, one might exist without a stomach. Everything is Creole--Creole cows, Creole milk, Creole eggs--even the ‘niggers’ are Creoles, and all speak French. My limited vocabulary of pure Parisian French has stood a heavy drain and has occasionally precipitated upon my hearers consequences which I feared would prove serious;--item--Night before last we stopped in a hamlet of shanties and at last found the ‘Hotel,’ kept by a talkative, voluble French idiot and his wife. The only guest bed in the shebang I occupied, and Mr. King slept on a mattress on the floor in another room. I was tired and suffering from an attack of nervous dyspepsia, from the greasy grub which I had been forced to eat in the face of starvation (everything here even a boiled egg is taught to swim in hot fat, and is only rescued therefrom by the famished boarder, who sometimes is obliged to bolt it after scraping off the congealed lard). It was with difficulty that I could get to sleep on the night in question, owing to my indisposition, together with a certain nervous apprehension as to the census of my immediate surroundings. I had barely dropped off into a snooze when I was startled by the movement of the window shutter near my bed, when looking, I observed a mule who was making a meal of a table-cloth near my bed. Once more after lying awake an hour I had begun to congratulate myself on prospects of slumber, when a shrill piercing note of a mocking-bird struck up its piccolo in the dead of night, another and another joined in the chorus, and kept this up for an hour before it dawned upon me that the birds were in cages on the farther side of the very partition of my room. On which discovery you may perhaps imagine how the limited French vocabulary at my command was exhausted and reinforced, but to no purpose. I raved and swore in Dutch, French, and Pidgeon English and was at length compelled to yell my colored servant (driver, servant, and interpreter) from his slumbers and make him translate a short address to the French idiot (who snorted in blissful sleep in concert with his spouse in another quarter of the shanty) to the effect that the offending birds be immediately chucked out of doors, beheaded, or strangled. The shrieking trio was finally removed to the rear but my sleep was ruined for that night. Only toward morning after dawn had just begun to lighten the east did I begin to feel drowsy, but at this point the ‘moqueurs’ were again restored to their original places and I was compelled to have them again removed, and by this time Monsieur and Madame were up and about preparing our morning ‘grease’ which they seemed to be doing by sheer force of lungs and belaboring of pans and kettles.