‘But not de missy!’ Rosina cried eagerly.
‘Ah, de missy! You tink when de black man rise like tiger in him wrath, him spare de missy! No, me fren’. Him doan’t gwine to spare her. De Dupuys is great people now; puffed up wid pride; look down on de black man. But dem will drop dem bluster bime-by, as soon as deir pride is taken out ob dem wid adversity.’
Rosina turned away with a look of terror. ‘You comin’ to prayer-meetin’?’ she asked hastily. ‘De bredderin will all be waitin’.’
Delgado, recalled once more to his alternative character, pushed away the strange volume through the door of his hut, took up his Bible and hymn-book with the gravest solemnity, drew himself up to his full height, and was soon walking along soberly by Rosina’s side, as respectable and decorous a native Methodist class-leader as one could wish to see in the whole green island of Trinidad.
Those who judge superficially of men and minds, would say at once that Delgado was a hypocrite. Those who know what religion really means to inferior races—a strange but sincere jumble of phrases, emotions, superstitions, and melodies, permeating and consecrating all their acts and all their passions, however evil, violent, or licentious—will recognise at once that in his own mind Louis Delgado was not conscious to himself in the faintest degree of any hypocrisy, craft, or even inconsistency.
(To be continued.)
SOME AMERICANISMS.
A very erroneous impression generally exists in this country as to the manner in which the English language is spoken in the United States. This has arisen in some degree from the circumstance that travellers have dwelt upon and exaggerated such peculiarities of language as have come under their observation in various parts of the Union; but also in greater measure from the fact that in English novels and dramas in which an American figures—no matter whether the character depicted be represented as a man of good social position and, presumably, fair education, or not—he is made to express himself in a dialect happily combining the peculiarities of speech of every section of the country from Maine to Texas. With the exception of the late Mr Anthony Trollope’s American Senator, I cannot recall to mind a single work of fiction in which this is not the case. Take, for instance, those portions of Martin Chuzzlewit the scenes of which are laid in the United States; Richard Fairfield, in Bulwer’s My Novel; the Colonel in Lever’s One of Them; Fullalove, in Charles Reade’s Very Hard Cash; the younger Fenton in Yates’s Black Sheep; or the American traveller in Mugby Junction—in each and every instance the result is to convey a most erroneous idea as to the manner in which our common tongue is ordinarily spoken in the United States.
It is the same on the stage. The dialect in which Americans are usually made to express themselves in English dramas is as incorrect and absurd as was the language put into the mouths of their Irish characters by the playwrights of the early part of the eighteenth century.
As a matter of fact, the speech of educated Americans differs but little from that of the same class in Great Britain; whilst, as regards the great bulk of the people of the United States, there can be no question but that they speak purer and more idiomatic English than do the masses here. In every State of the Union the language of the inhabitants can be understood without the slightest difficulty. This is more than can be said of the dialects of the peasantry in various parts of England, these being in many instances perfectly unintelligible to a stranger. Again, the fluency of expression and command of language possessed by Americans even in the humbler ranks of life forms a marked contrast to the poverty of speech of the same class in this country, where, as an eminent philologist has declared, a very considerable proportion of the agricultural population habitually make use of a vocabulary not exceeding three hundred words.