his hands, as if he were trying to recall the images of the past, thus began
his narration:--

"Monsieur de la Tour, a young man who was a native of Normandy, after
having in vain solicited a commission in the French Army, or some support
from his own family, at length determined to seek his fortune in this
island, where he arrived in 1726. He brought hither a young woman whom he
loved tenderly, and by whom he was no less tenderly beloved. She belonged
to a rich and ancient family of the same province; but he had married her
without fortune, and in opposition to the will of her relations, who
refused their consent, because he was found guilty of being descended from
parents who had no claims to nobility. Monsieur de la Tour, leaving his
wife at Port Louis, embarked for Madagascar, in 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