Mr. Sala proceeds to give a most amusing account of his ride from New York to Richmond, with various criticisms of sleeping-car accommodation, heartily endorsed by all American travelers who have read them. Arriving at Richmond he asked the usual question: "Is not the negro idle, thriftless and thievish?" From time immemorial it has been asserted that the laws of meum and tuum have no meaning for the colored man. It is a joke current in more than one American city, that the police have standing orders to arrest every negro seen carrying a turkey or a chicken along the street. In other words, the funny man would have us believe that the innate love of poultry in the Ethiopian's breast is so great that the chances are against his having been possessed of sufficient force of character to pass a store or market where any birds were exposed for sale and not watched.
It is doubtless a libel on the colored race to state that even the majority of its members are chicken thieves by descent rather than inclination, just as it is a libel on their religion to insinuate that a colored camp meeting is almost certain to involve severe inroads into the chicken coops and roosts of the neighboring farmers. Certain it is, however, that chicken stealing is one of the most dangerous causes of backsliding on the part of colored converts and enthusiastic singers of hymns in negro churches. The case of the convert who was asked by his pastor, a week after his admission to the church, if he had stolen a chicken since his conversion, and who carefully concealed a stolen duck under his coat while he assured the good man that he had not, is an exaggerated one of course, but it is quoted as a good story in almost every State and city in the Union.
Mr. Sala objects very much to judging a whole class of people by a few street-corner or cross-road loungers. The negro he found to be superstitious, just as we find them to-day. Even educated negroes are apt to give credence to many stories which, on the face of them, appear ridiculous. The words "Hoodoo" and "Mascot" have a meaning among these people of which we have only a dim conception, and when sickness enters a family the aid of an alleged doctor, who is often a charlatan of the worst character, is apt to be sought. It will take several generations to work out this characteristic, and perhaps the greatest complaint the colored race has against those who formerly held them in subjection, is the way in which voodoo and supernatural stories were told ignorant slaves with a view to frightening them into obedience, and inciting them to extra exertions.
For absolute ignorance and apparent lack of human understanding, the negro loafer to be found around some of our Southern towns and depots may be quoted as a signal and quite amusing example. The hat, as Mr. Sala humorously puts it, resembles an inverted coal scuttle or bucket without handles, and pierced by many holes. It is something like the bonnet of a Brobdingnagian Quakeress, huge and flapped and battered, and fearful to look upon.
"Hang all this equipment," this interesting writer goes on to say, "on the limbs of a tall negro of any age between sixteen and sixty, and then let him stand close to the scaffold-like platform of the depot shanty and let him loaf. His attitude is one of complete and apathetic immobility. He does not grin. He may be chewing, but he does not smoke. He does not beg; at least in so far as I observed him he stood in no posture and assumed no gestures belonging to the mendicant. He looms at you with a dull, stony, preoccupied gaze, as though his thoughts were a thousand miles away in the unknown land; while once in every quarter of an hour or so he woke up to a momentary consciousness that he was a thing neither rich nor rare, and so wondered how in thunder he got there. He is a derelict, a fragment of flotsam and jetsam cast upon the not too hospitable shore of civilization after the great storm had lashed the Southern sea to frenzy and the ship of slavery had gone to pieces forever. Possibly he is a good deal more human than he looks, and if he chose to bestir himself and to address himself to articulate discourse, could tell you a great many things about his wants and wishes, his views and feelings on things in general which, to you, might prove little more than amazing. As things go, he prefers to do nothing and to proffer no kind of explanation as to why he is standing there in a metaphorical mill pond very much 'longer than he oughter.'"
One turns with pleasure from the severe, but perhaps not overdrawn, character sketch of the colored loafer, to the better side of the modern negro. The intense desire for education, and the keen recognition of the fact that knowledge is power, point to a time when utter ignorance even among the negroes will be a thing of the past. Prejudice is hard to fight against, and the colored man has often a considerable amount of handicap to overcome. But just as Mr. Sala found the typical negro, "standing in the mill pond longer than he oughter," a sad memento of the past, so the traveler can find many an intelligent and entertaining individual whose accent betrays his color even in the darkest night, but whose cute expressions and pleasant reminiscences go a long way towards convincing even the sternest critic that the future is full of hope for a race whose past has in it so little that is either pleasing or satisfactory.
[CHAPTER XV.]
OUR NATIONAL PARK.
A Delightful Rhapsody--Early History of Yellowstone Park--A Fish Story which Convulsed Congress--The First White Man to Visit the Park--A Race for Life--Philosophy of the Hot Springs--Mount Everts--From the Geysers to Elk Park--Some Old Friends and New Ones--Yellowstone Lake--The Angler's Paradise.
Yellowstone Park is generally included in the list of the wonders of the world. It is certainly unique in every respect, and no other nation, modern or ancient, has ever been able to boast of a recreation ground and park provided by nature and supplied with such magnificent and extraordinary attractions and peculiarities. It is a park upon a mountain, being more than 10,000 feet above the level of the sea. Irregular in shape, it may be said to be about sixty miles across on the average, and it contains an area of 3,500 square miles.