human
Eh, Père Labat!--what changes there have been since thy day!... And all that ephemeral man has had power to change has been changed,--ideas, morals, beliefs, the whole social fabric. But the eternal summer remains,--and the Hesperian magnificence of azure sky and violet sea,--and the jewel-colours of the perpetual hills; the same tepid winds that rippled thy cane-fields two hundred years ago still blow over Sainte-Marie; the same purple shadows lengthen and dwindle and turn with the wheeling of the sun. God's witchery still fills this land; and the heart of the stranger is even yet snared by the beauty of it; and the dreams of him that forsakes it will surely be haunted--even as were thine own, Père Labat--by memories of its Eden-summer: the sudden leap of the light over a thousand peaks in the glory of a tropic dawn,--the perfumed peace of enormous azure noons,--and shapes of palm, wind-rocked in the burning of colossal sunsets,--and the silent flickering of the great fire-flies, through the lukewarm darkness, when mothers call their children home.... '_Mi fanal Pè Labatt!--mi Pè Labatt ka vini pouend ou!_'