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Franquini, chief of 30,000 Pandours, has come in person to superintend this important capture; and lies hidden, with a strong party, in the woods to rearward. Prussians about 200, scattered in posts, occupy the hedges in front, for guard of the ovens; to rear, Jaromirz being wholly ours, there is no suspicion.
There are few scenes more original and picturesque in France than that presented by the ruinous old church, half open to the weather, and the ancient houses that form a framework round it. Under the lofty Gothic vaulting are wooden shops and shanties, and, looking up, you see the smoke from bakers' ovens hanging about the ribs of the great arches, which it has blackened.
When the telegram had been delivered, and the bearer of it dismissed with a gratuity, the relieved populace returned to the contiguities of shade from which curiosity had drawn it the women to their baking in the mud ovens under the orange-trees, or to the interminable combing of their long, straight hair; the men to their cigarettes and gossip in the cantinas.
The prayer lasted yet a quarter of an hour; on its conclusion, the company rose and breakfasted with a good appetite; but offered nothing to the distinguished personages in the other apartment, who were suffered to leave the house unnoticed. I found the bread-fruit, as baked in the ovens by the Europeans here, excellent. The natives retain their old custom of baking in the earth.
They bury the dead that is, all the upper-class dead in nichos, or ovens, such as are found in the old cemeteries of New Orleans. The cemetery, which is usually owned, not by the municipality but by the church, is surrounded by a brick or stone wall six or eight feet high surmounted by a balustrade of red baked clay in an urn design.
A very little of this, with a bit of yam deliciously cooked, and brought to me each day as a present by some one from their cooking ovens, makes a capital dinner. Then I have some rice and sugar for breakfast, a biscuit and coffee, and a bit of bread-fruit perhaps; and all the little delicacies are here salt, pepper, mustard, even to a bottle of pickles so I am pretty well off, I think.
Farther in the bush, huts, small patches of cultivation, and smoking ovens, have been found by hunters. There are still three runaways in the woods of Tutuila, whither they escaped upon a raft. For the Samoans are not cannibals, do not seem to remember when they were, and regard the practice with a disfavour equal to our own.
When I reached Angouleme, where I expected to find Noel, the King of Prussia's cook, I only found his father, whose talents in the matter of pates was something prodigious. His eloquence was as fervent as his ovens. He said he would send his pates all over Europe to any address I liked to give him. "What! To Venice, London, Warsaw, St. Petersburg?" "To Constantinople, if you like.
The inhabitants of this group seem to be a very industrious race. They manufacture all sorts of fishing apparatus very cleverly; they are expert in finding their way through the forests; they know how to prepare the pith of the sago-plant, and to make ovens for the cooking of the sago; they can turn pottery ware, weave mats, carpets, baskets, and can also carve idols and figures.
I always like, too, the cheeriness of the chestnut and peanut ovens of the Italians; the pleasant smell and friendly smoke that rise from them suggest a simple and homelike life which there are so any things in this great, weary, heedless city to make one forget. But I am allowing myself to wander too far from Mrs. Makely and her letter, which reached me only two days before Thanksgiving.
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