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Updated: May 31, 2025
The African race are much indebted to you for showing up the good sides of their characters, their cheerfulness, and especially their powers of humor, which are admirably set off by their peculiar patois, in the same manner as the expression of the Scottish sentiment is by the peculiar Scottish dialect. People differ; but I was most struck among your characters with Uncle Tiff and Nina.
At last we float off two lighters full of infected, though respectable, material, towed by oarsmen of most scurvy appearance, but free from every suspicion of taint. The sea is still rough, the sun is hot, and a fat Jewess becomes sea-sick. An Italian Jew rails at the boatmen ahead, in the Neapolitan patois, for the distance is long, the Quarantine being on the land-side of Beyrout.
Besides, the patois these people spoke was vastly different from ordinary French, as taught in schools and colleges, and what it might be like I had not in those days the faintest idea, not having read Rabelais. The worst desillusionnement I suffered I will recount.
Our muleteer, Delorier, brought up the rear with his cart, waddling ankle-deep in the mud, alternately puffing at his pipe, and ejaculating in his prairie patois: "Sacre enfant de garce!" as one of the mules would seem to recoil before some abyss of unusual profundity.
He had a round ruddy face, and when he smiled, which he did all the time, his teeth gleamed square and white from the curly blackness of his beard. He got out his pans and buffalo meat, and was dropping pieces of hardtack into the spitting tallow when Susan addressed him in his own tongue, the patois of the province of Quebec.
The Prussian stole out into the sitting room and stood listening at the door to the public hallway, his companion standing by with a mutinous air. "Oh, come along!" he insisted, in a stage whisper. "Shut up! Listen...." Shuffling footfalls traversed the hallway. The front door was opened. The clear voice of an Englishwoman was answered in the slurring patois of a negro. "No'm, he ain't in."
But as there are more Scotchmen in London than in Edinburgh, and better oranges can be bought for less money in New York than in New Orleans, so it may be that if you want to find really superior English you must leave England altogether, abandon it to its defective but firmly-rooted patois, and seek in more classic shades for the well spring of Saxon undefiled.
At the end of that walk we saw ahead of us a handsome white edifice, built of stucco, and of the summer-house order. It stood on a small plateau on the first slope of the cliff and commanded an exquisite view of the bay, the blue waters of which lay some two hundred feet or so below it. "His Excellency is in there," said the old man, in his Sicilian patois.
When three more minutes passed and the farther shore was still a deserted blank, the Mexican dug both rowels into his mustang and galloped down to the river, muttering curses in the patois of his native Sonora. Apparently the closing in had been delayed too long. There were fresh hoof-prints in the marl of the hither approach to the shallow ford, but none to match them on the farther side.
In one corner was a fiddler, and on the veille, flourished for the occasion with satinettes and fern, sat two centeniers and the prevot, singing an old song in the patois of three parishes. Ranulph looked at the scene lingeringly. Here he was, with mystery and peril to hasten his steps, loitering at the spot where the light of home streamed out upon the roadway.
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