iew in the shop,
which I fear has lost its comical quality in the relating. To enter a
door and come serenely in among dingy mahogany and glass objects, to
bargain haughtily for a brass bauble with the shopkeeper, and to have
a few exchanged remarks suddenly turn the whole place into a sort of
bedlam with a gibbering scientist dashing skulls at me to prove his
fixed idea, and myself quite furious--I laughed more than twice; but,
by the time I had approached the neighborhood of the carpenter's
shop, another side of it had brought reflection to my mind. Here was a
foreigner to whom slavery and the Lost Cause were nothing, whose whole
association with the South had begun but five years ago; and the race
question had brought his feelings to this pitch! He had seen the Kings
Port negro with the eyes of the flesh, and not with the eyes of theory,
and as a result the reddest rag for him was pale beside a Boston
philanthropist!

Nevertheless, I have said already that I am no lover of superlatives,
and in doctrine especially is this true. We need not expect a Confucius
from the negro, nor yet a Chesterfield; but I am an enemy also of that
blind and base hate against him, which conducts nowhere save to the
de-civilizing of white and black alike. Who brought him here? Did he
invite himself? Then let us make the best of it and teach him, lead
him, compel him to live self-respecting, not as statesman, poet, or
financier, but by the honorable toil of his hand and sweat of his brow.
Because "the door of hope" was once opened too suddenly for him is no
reason for slamming it now forever in his face.

Thus mentally I lectured back at the Teuton as I went through the
streets of Kings Port; and after a while I turned a corner which took me
abruptly, as with one magic step, out of the white man's world into the
blackest Congo. Even the well-inhabited quarter of Kings Port (and I
had now come within this limited domain) holds narrow lanes and recesses
which teem and swarm with negroes. As cracks will run through fine
porcelain, so do these black rifts of Africa lurk almost invisible
among the gardens and the houses. The picture that these places offered,
tropic, squalid, and fecund, often caused me to walk through them and
watch the basking population; the intricate, broken wooden galleries,
the rickety outside stair cases, the red and yellow splashes of color on
the clothes lines, the agglomerate rags that stuffed holes in decaying
roofs