in Washington a lady, as loyal of course as she was accomplished, who told me that she once owned a female slave. The poor woman was about to become a mother. My informant—as it is the kindly custom of Southern ladies to do-busied herself in preparing for the advent of her bond-servant's infant. In good time she gave the slave money to purchase baby linen. one day, "what did you buy?" had bought a silk umbrella!

"Well, Peggy," she asked The slave told her. She Such was her notion of a

layette. Were this a solitary instance, or one that I had heard at second hand, I should be ashamed to quote it; but hundreds of witnesses could, if needful, be put into the box to prove how utterly childish and irresponsible the vast majority of these poor people are. From the old slaves who crawl about the houses of their owners, fed for nothing and not worked, saying and doing what they please, and sleeping with their feet so thrust into the embers on the hearth that they scorch their toe-nails off, to the little black brats snuggling like so many guinea-pigs about the floors of Southern houses; from these to the women who buy silk umbrellas instead of childbed linen, and who come roaring to their mistress for remedies if they have a sore finger or a soft corn -who will only take medicine when they are sick from her hand-and who, as mothers, are so shamefully neglectful of and so wantonly cruel to their children, that the white ladies are often compelled to take the little ones away from their unnatural parents to preserve their lives-it is the same lamentable case of an inferior and impracticable race. And in the North-the free North-the land of liberty, of intelli

gence, of newspapers, and Methodist chapels, and common schools; do they fare better there? I declare that, of all the miserable and woe-begone objects I have ever beheld out of a Russian gaol or an Italian lazar-house, the free negroes I have seen in New York are the wretchedest and most forlorn. Take away those who are coachmen or servants in private families, and who are clad in some kind of decent. livery by the employers; take away a proportion of mulattoes and "bright" coloured people (among which class the women are often given to tawdry finery in apparel, but seldom to personal cleanliness); take away a few, a very few old negroes, who have made money by storekeeping, and wear broadcloth and tall hats; and the residue are a listless, decrepit, drowsy, cowering race, always going to the wall, always sliding and slinking away, always ragged, always dirty -lying and pilfering and tipsifying themselves in a feckless, shambling kind of way-horribly overgrown children-crétins whose goîtres are on their brains instead of in their throats. In the back slums of New York you meet them prowling about with baskets full of scraps and offal. When the police rout out some dilapidated tenement at the Five Points, they are sure to find negroes lurking and snoozling among the rubbish. Let a streak of sunshine be cast across the pavement, and you are sure to find a negro sitting on a doorstep, basking in the radiant warmth. The negroes at Washington are sturdier, comelier, more intelligent fellows. But they have been bred up not to freedom but to slavery. At Baltimore the railway porters are athletic, active, and willing negroes. Only the day before yesterday they were slaves.

Turn them loose in the blessed land of freedom, and see how long it will be before they hopelessly deteriorate. There is, I believe, a proviso in the laws of the State of New York, by which negroes who have acquired a certain amount of property-some fifty or sixty pounds sterling are entitled to vote. Last year one of the candidates for the mayoralty of the Empire City was accused of having gone down to a meeting of these moneyed negroes, and promised them all manner of fine things-permission to ride in the street railway cars among the rest-if they would vote for him. The accusation was I hear unfounded, and a mere electioneering ruse; but, had it been otherwise, the candidate would have taken but little by his motion. There are certainly not three hundred coloured people who can justify such a claim to the franchise, in this city of a million of inhabitants.

But is the existence of the educated negro, of the “learned nigger," to be denied? By no means. There are President Roberts of Liberia, and Mr. Frederick Douglas, just as there were Phillis Wheatley and Toussaint L'Ouverture. There was the Hottentot Venus, and there was Mr. Lumley's "Black Swan." But how many more? and how lamentably few are the intellectual plums in this huge black pudding. That the negro, however, can sometimes say a shrewd thing is unquestionable. I have been told of an "intelligent contraband," who, escaping from Dixie into the land of Abraham, was pressed by a white patriot to enter into the military service. of the North, but manifested an unaccountable reluctance to shoulder a musket. Why don't you enlist, Ginger ?" asked the white patriot. "Wal, mas'r," replied the contraband,

"Did yever see two dogs fightin' for a bone?" Certainly,

Ginger." Wal, did yever see de bone fight?" "Not I." "Wal, mas'r, you'se both a fightin', and Ginger's de bone, an' he's not gwine to fight in this hyar difficulmty." The conclusion arrived at by the intelligent contraband was, I think logical. I hope the story is not apocryphal, or the invention of some white minstrel of the Christy or Bryant race, who blacks his face and sings songs the like of which were never heard in Dixie. You will often, also, get a drolly shrewd reply, or a cutting bit of repartee from a negro. In "giving evasive answers" they are unapproachable. A friend of mine had a negro butler who had embezzled from four to five hundred dollars. When arraigned before a family council for his misdeeds, he "concluded to own up there had been a little misapprehension," i. e., that he had stolen the five hundred dollars. There is a very good story told of a negro witness who was called to speak to the character of a brother darkey, and who gave him a very bad one. Do you mean to say he's a thief, sir?" thundered the cross-examining counsel. "I'se not gwine ter say he's a tief, sa," replied the witness; "buff wattersay's dis. If Ivers a chicken, an' I saw dat nigga' loafin' round, I'd roost high, dat's all." Equally evasive is the reply of the negro who is asked by his master whether he is for Lincoln or for Jeff Davis. "I'se for de Lord, mas'r," he answers. "He'll work out his salvatiums. Bress de Lord."

The coloured people have, it is well known, a considerable aptitude for mimicry. But it is mimicry of that order which, as children, we were told used to lead to the catching of

baboons. The hunter laid his trap-a tub of water—and at a distance from that a tub full of birdlime. He caught the eye of the baboon, stooped, and laid his face in the water. The imitative brute watched him; walked to the next tub, and thrust his muzzle into the birdlime. So the baboon was caught. Negroes will imitate to the life the follies and the absurdities of the whites. They will put on the petitmaître airs of their employers. I saw at Washington a waiter who, in moustache, whisker, turn-down collar, and even to a lisp and a limp, was the image of Lord Dundreary dipped in a vatful of ink. There are many black clergymen, schoolmasters, and lecturers, who can talk by the hour together, and use the longest words, and all the outward forms and symbols of argumentative discourse; but the mimicry and poll-parrotism break out at last. A friend, himself an ardent Republican, gave me recently a forcible illustration of the painful shallowness of the negro intellect, even when trained to an apparently high degree of culture. He was riding in a railway carriage, and close by him were two full negroes, one a minister of some one of the innumerable denominations that here obtain; the other a "classleader" in a Sunday school. Both were well-dressed, neat, fluent, and scrupulously courteous and urbane. It was a

Sunday morning, and the clerical negro was reading an illustrated newspaper, say Harper's Weekly. The class leader took occasion to express, very respectfully, his surprise that his companion, "a minister ob de Gosple," should be perusing so mundane a publication on the Sabbath. The clergyman, in a torrent of verbosity, justified himself, mainly on the principle