ashore with great care just before I landed myself. I would perhaps have
tracked the ways of that man of immense sincerity for a little while,
but I had some of my own very pressing business to attend to, which in
the end got mixed up with an earthquake and so I had no time to give
to Ricardo. The reader need not be told that I have not forgotten him,
though.

My contact with the faithful Pedro was much shorter and my observation
of him was less complete but incomparably more anxious. It ended in a
sudden inspiration to get out of his way. It was in a hovel of sticks
and mats by the side of a path. As I went in there only to ask for a
bottle of lemonade I have not to this day the slightest idea what in
my appearance or actions could have roused his terrible ire. It became
manifest to me less than two minutes after I had set eyes on him for the
first time, and though immensely surprised of course I didn't stop
to think it out I took the nearest short cut--through the wall. This
bestial apparition and a certain enormous buck nigger encountered in
Haiti only a couple of months afterwards, have fixed my conception of
blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal, to
the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards.
Of Pedro never. The impression was less vivid. I got away from him too
quickly.

It seems to me but natural that those three buried in a corner of my
memory should suddenly get out into the light of the world--so natural
that I offer no excuse for their existence, They were there, they had to
come out; and this is a sufficient excuse for a writer of tales who had
taken to his trade without preparation, or premeditation, and without
any moral intention but that which pervades the whole scheme of this
world of senses.