fallen, the purple night set in,
and from the woods on shore a chorus of frogs had commenced
chattering, quacking, squealing, whistling, not to cease till
sunrise.

So ended our first trip in the New World; and we got back to the
ship, but not to sleep. Already a coal-barge lay on either side of
her, and over the coals we scrambled, through a scene which we would
fain forget. Black women on one side were doing men's work, with
heavy coal-baskets on their heads, amid screaming, chattering, and
language of which, happily, we understood little or nothing. On the
other, a gang of men and boys, who, as the night fell, worked, many
of them, altogether naked, their glossy bronze figures gleaming in
the red lamplight, and both men and women singing over their work in
wild choruses, which, when the screaming cracked voices of the women
were silent, and the really rich tenors of the men had it to
themselves, were not unpleasant. A lad, seeming the poet of the
gang, stood on the sponson, and in the momentary intervals of work
improvised some story, while the men below took up and finished each
verse with a refrain, piercing, sad, running up and down large and
easy intervals. The tunes were many and seemingly familiar, all
barbaric, often ending in the minor key, and reminding us much,
perhaps too much, of the old Gregorian tones. The words were all
but unintelligible. In one song we caught 'New York' again and
again, and then 'Captain he heard it, he was troubled in him mind.'

'Ya-he-ho-o-hu'--followed the chorus.

'Captain he go to him cabin, he drink him wine and whisky--'

'Ya-he,' etc.

'You go to America? You as well go to heaven.'

'Ya-he,' etc.

These were all the scraps of negro poetry which we could overhear;
while on deck the band was playing quadrilles and waltzes, setting
the negro shoveller dancing in the black water at the barge-bottom,
shovel in hand; and pleasant white folks danced under the awning,
till the contrast between the refinement within and the brutality
without became very painful. For brutality it was, not merely in
the eyes of the sentimentalist, but in those of the moralist; still
more in the eyes of those who try to believe that all God's human
children may be some-when, somewhere, somehow, reformed into His
likeness. We were shocked to hear that at another island the evils
of coaling are still worse; and that the white authorities have
tried in