order to purchase a few slaves to assist him in forming a plantation in this island. He landed at that unhealthy season which commences about the middle of October: and soon after his arrival died of the pestilential fever, which prevails in that country six months of the year, and which will forever baffle the attempts of the European nations to form establishments on that fatal soil. His effects were seized upon by the rapacity of strangers; and his wife, who was pregnant, found herself a widow in a country where she had neither credit nor recommendation, and no earthly possession, or rather support, save one negro woman. Too delicate to solicit protection or relief from any other man after the death of him whom alone she loved, misfortune armed her with courage, and she resolved to cultivate with her slave a little spot of ground, and procure for herself the means of subsistence. In an island almost a desert, and where the ground was left to the choice of the settler, she avoided those spots which were most fertile and most favourable to commerce; and seeking some nook of the mountain, some secret asylum, where she might live solitary and unknown, she bent her way from the town towards those rocks, where she wished to shelter herself as in a nest. All suffering creatures, from a sort of common instinct, fly for refuge amidst their pains to haunts the most wild and desolate; as if rocks could form a rampart against misfortune; as if the calm of nature could hush the tumults of the soul. That Providence, which lends its support when we ask but the supply of our necessary wants, had a blessing in reserve for Madame de la Tour, which neither riches nor greatness can purchase; this blessing was a friend.

"The spot to which Madame de la Tour fled had already been inhabited a year by a young woman of a lively, good natured, and affectionate disposition. Margaret (for that was her name) was born in Britany, of a family of peasants, by whom she was cherished and beloved, and with whom she might have passed life in simple rustic happiness, if, misled by the weakness of a tender heart, she had not listened to the passion of a gentleman in the neighbourhood, who promised her marriage. He soon abandoned her, and adding inhumanity to seduction, refused to ensure a provision for the child of which she was pregnant. Margaret then determined to leave for ever her native village, and go, where her fault might be concealed, to some colony distant from that country where she had lost the only portion of a poor peasant girl—her reputation. With some borrowed money she purchased an old negro slave, with whom she cultivated a little spot of this canton. Here Madame de la Tour, followed by her negro woman, found Margaret 

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