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For so the Indian story ran once on a time a tribe of Chaymas built their palm-leaf ajoupas upon the very spot where the lake now lies, and lived a merry life. The sea swarmed with shellfish and turtle, and the land with pine- apples; the springs were haunted by countless flocks of flamingoes and horned screamers, pajuis and blue ramiers; and, above all, by humming-birds.
In the mean time they selected women for extemporaneous partners, to whom they addressed a few significant words before taking them home to their ajoupas, to the effect that their antecedents were not worth minding, but this, slightly tapping the musket, "which never deceived me, will avenge me, if you do."
Dignified, courteous, hospitable, according to their little means, they salute the white Senor without defiance and without servility, and are delighted if he will sit in their clay and palm ajoupas, and eat oranges and Malacca apples from their own trees, on their own freehold land.
As the Indian servants stretched themselves out in slumber under the bright stars and in the partial shelter of their ajoupas, a bat of the vampire species, attracted by the emanations of their bodies, came sailing over them, and emboldened by the silence reigning everywhere, selected a victim for attack.
They differed from the cabins by being closed in on their four faces, of which only one gave access to the interior. The Indians, accustomed to live in the open air, free and untrammeled, were not able to accustom themselves to the imprisonment of the ajoupas, which agreed better with the life of the blacks.
His church of San Josef, though still unfinished, had been taxed, as well as all the Roman Catholic churches of the island, to build the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Port of Spain; and he, refusing to obey an order which he considered unjust, threw up his cure, and retreated with the rest of the family to the palm-leaf ajoupas in the forest. M. F chose three of his finest Negroes as companions.
We hear a great deal of the barbarity with which West Indian planters and hunters in the seventeenth century treated their servants, and we may well believe that many of the latter, finding their situation unendurable, ran away from their plantations or ajoupas to join the crew of a chance corsair hovering in the neighbourhood. The hunters' life, as we have seen, was not one of revelry and ease.
At last the shades of night descended on the scene, and the Indians, laying aside ragout, tweezers, cup-and-ball, etcetera, went down to the sand-flats, and crouched, kneeled, or squatted under the leafy ajoupas. Of course their visitors accompanied them.
Here, therefore, they had called a halt, built a number of ajoupas, or leafy sheds, about two hundred yards from the edge of the river, under the shelter of which to sit at night and watch for their prey. The turtles, it was found, were expected to land that night.
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