Page:Haiti- Her History and Her Detractors.djvu/402

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Haiti: Her History and Her Detractors

sent to an insane asylum in Bangor. And the selectmen of Jonesport have issued strict orders that there be no more religious services of any kind on the island."

Had the foregoing events occurred in Haiti, instead of taking place in the United States, her detractors would not have missed the opportunity to assert that Haitian mothers are accustomed to sacrifice their children in the vaudou ceremonies. The incident would have been grossly exaggerated and would not have been imputed to the insanity of a handful of fanatics. Within ten or twenty years after, these ceremonies would have been related by foreign writers to cast aspersion on the whole Haitian Republic.

Public instruction, which is comparatively much more wide-spread in the United States than in Haiti, has however not yet succeeded in protecting the inhabitants of the former country from charlatans and fortune-tellers. In a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland, a woman was the victim of one of these American papa-lois. The case was tried at Elmira, New York, where Walter P. Collins, alias Dr. Zollo, was arrested on a charge of grand larceny. "I am very superstitious," said the complainant, Miss Mary M. Miller, "and I believed in Dr. Zollo, for he read my palm very cleverly. He told me that it was necessary for me to bring money, because money was the one goal in the world for which every one was pushing, and one's thought centred upon it constantly. He said that through this money he could transmit an influence on me, as a result of which my affairs would not be so tangled, and that I would be able to rent my property, the poor returns from which caused me much worry. I brought him $500. He put it in an envelope, as I supposed, and gave it to me, telling me to go home and bring him more the next day, also to bring back the envelope supposed to contain the $500. I brought back the sealed envelope and $300. He opened the envelope, apparently took therefrom the $500, and, bunching the $300 in bills with it, asked me to hold one end while