and bad hotels, actors and actresses and musical
prodigies. I learned that Mrs. Gardener had gone to Omaha to hear Booth
and Barrett, who were to play there next week, and that Mary Anderson
was having a great success in 'A Winter's Tale,' in London.

The door from the office opened, and Johnnie Gardener came in, directing
Blind d'Arnault--he would never consent to be led. He was a heavy, bulky
mulatto, on short legs, and he came tapping the floor in front of him
with his gold-headed cane. His yellow face was lifted in the light, with
a show of white teeth, all grinning, and his shrunken, papery eyelids
lay motionless over his blind eyes.

'Good evening, gentlemen. No ladies here? Good evening, gentlemen. We
going to have a little music? Some of you gentlemen going to play for
me this evening?' It was the soft, amiable Negro voice, like those I
remembered from early childhood, with the note of docile subservience
in it. He had the Negro head, too; almost no head at all; nothing behind
the ears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool. He would have
been repulsive if his face had not been so kindly and happy. It was the
happiest face I had seen since I left Virginia.

He felt his way directly to the piano. The moment he sat down, I noticed
the nervous infirmity of which Mrs. Harling had told me. When he was
sitting, or standing still, he swayed back and forth incessantly, like
a rocking toy. At the piano, he swayed in time to the music, and when
he was not playing, his body kept up this motion, like an empty mill
grinding on. He found the pedals and tried them, ran his yellow hands up
and down the keys a few times, tinkling off scales, then turned to the
company.

'She seems all right, gentlemen. Nothing happened to her since the
last time I was here. Mrs. Gardener, she always has this piano tuned
up before I come. Now gentlemen, I expect you've all got grand voices.
Seems like we might have some good old plantation songs tonight.'

The men gathered round him, as he began to play 'My Old Kentucky Home.'
They sang one Negro melody after another, while the mulatto sat rocking
himself, his head thrown back, his yellow face lifted, his shrivelled
eyelids never fluttering.

He was born in the Far South, on the d'Arnault plantation, where the
spirit if not the fact of slavery persisted. When he was three weeks
old, he had an illness which left him totally blind. As soon as he was
old enough to sit up alone and toddle