their comic songs were accompanied
by a faultless orchestra was understandable enough. One can believe in a
police band. One is not surprised that the police band is a good band.
To believe that the ebony-visaged person with the huge red
indiarubber-flexible mouth who sings "Under the archway, Archibald," and
follows this amorous ditty with a clog dance is--in his washed
moments--the terror of burglars, requires unthinkable flights of
imagination. As I gazed at this singular resurrection of Moore and
Burgess and breathless childhood's afternoons at the St. James's
Hall--the half circle of inanely alert faces the colour of fresh
polished boots--the preposterous uniforms and expansive
shirt-fronts--the "nigger" dialect which this strange convention demands
but which cannot be said to resemble the speech of any African tribe yet
discovered--I found that by no effort of faith or credulity could I
pierce the disguise and perceive policemen.

It is at least twenty years since I met a nigger minstrel in the flesh.
Vague ghosts of bygone persons and of piquant anachronisms seemed to
float approvingly in the air: the Prince Consort, bustles, the high
bicycle, sherry, Moody and Sankey, the Crystal Palace, Labouchere, "Pigs
in Clover," Lottie Collins, Evolution, Bimetallism: hosts of forgotten
images, names and shibboleths came popping out from the brain's dusty
pigeon-holes, magically released by the spectacle of the nigger troupe.

Yes, I was indeed switched into the past by Mr. Bones, Massa Jawns'n and
the rest. And yet the present might have seemed more emphatic and more
poignant. One felt, rather than saw, an audience of several hundred
persons in the dim rows of chairs. And laughing at the broad witticisms
of the niggers, or enjoying their choruses and orchestral
accompaniments, one forgot just what that half-glimpsed audience
consisted of; what it meant, and how it came to be here assembled.

Of course when the lights were turned up in the interval, one beheld the
usual spectacle: stretchers, wheeled chairs, crutches, bandaged heads,
arms in splints, blind men, men with one arm, men with one leg: rank on
rank of war's flotsam and jetsam, British, Australians, New Zealanders,
Newfoundlanders, Canadians, come to make merry over the minstrels: in
the front row the Colonel and the Matron, with officer patients; here
and there an orderly or a V.A.D.; here and there a Sister with her
"boys." It was a family gathering. I descrie