It is not that they are naturally savage, inhuman, brutal. Centuries of Christianity and cultivation might probably have done for the black man what they have done for the white; but those centuries have been denied him; and if he is to be taken at once from a state of utter ignorance and degradation to be placed on a footing of social equality with those who have hitherto been his masters—a race that has passed gradually through the successive stages he is expected to compass in one stride—surely it must be necessary to restrain him from the excesses peculiar to the lusty adolescence of nations, as of individuals, by some stronger repressive influence than need be applied to the staid and sober demeanour of a people arrived long ago at maturity, if not already past their prime.
Signor Bartoletti did not trouble himself with such speculations. Intimidation he found answered his purpose tolerably, corporal punishment extremely well.
Passing from the supervision of some five-score hoes, picking their labour out with great deliberation amongst the clefts and ridges of a half-cleared mountain, clothed to its summit in a tangle of luxuriant beauty, he threaded a line of wattled mud cottages, cool with thick heavy thatch, dazzling in whitewash, and interspersed with fragrant almond-trees, breaking the scorching sunlight into a thousand shimmering rays, as they rustled and quivered to the whisper of the land-breeze, not yet exhausted by the heat.
At the door of one of these huts he spied a comely negro girl, whose duties should have kept her in the kitchen of the great house. He also observed that she concealed something bulky under her snowy apron, and looked stealthily about as if afraid of being seen.
He had a step noiseless and sure as a cat; she never heard him coming, but started with a loud scream when she felt his hand on her shoulder, and incontinently began to cry.
“What have you got there, Fleurette?” asked the overseer, sternly. “Bring it out at once, and show it up!”
“Nothing, Massa,” answered Fleurette, of course, though she was sobbing all the time. “It only Aunt Rosalie’s piccaninny, I take him in please, just now, to his mammy, out of the wind.”
There was but such a light breath of air as kept the temperature below actual suffocation.
“Wind! nonsense!” exclaimed Bartoletti, perspiring and exasperated. “Aunt Rosalie’s child was in the baby-yard half an hour ago; here, let me look at him!” and the overseer snatched up Fleurette’s apron to discover a pair of plump black hands, clasped over a well-fattened turkey, cleaned, plucked, and ready for the pot.