Of the ruthless invader—
There the thing broke down, and—the events of the night before, the Englishman, the happy Northern family and the thoroughly reconstructed general, suggesting it in some queer cerebral way—a still more foolish negro song, which I had forgotten for years, popped up in my brain-pan:
Lit-tel gal, I give you ninepunce
Ef you will dance de Haul-back;
And I kin dance de Haul-back,
And you kin dance de Haul back,
And we kin dance de Haul-back.
The relevancy of this utterly absurd thing did not then strike me. I see it now. A certain people—whom I do love with my whole heart, not in spite of their faults, but because of them: are they not my own?—have been dancing the Haul-back for many generations, and now, under my own eye and quite perceptibly in the rural parts of Virginia, the dance is coming to an end. Slowly but surely we are lapsing into Bullo-doodledom, with a momentary preponderance of Bull. Tempora—do, I entreat you, allow me the use of my solitary dear delightful old bit of Latin—mutantur; ay! and we mutate with them. The world moves, and no amount of Haul-back will stay it.
RICHARD B. ELDER.