phet of St. Louis; or of the lumberers of Michigan; or
of the Mexicans of Arizona; or of the German beer-gardens of Chicago;
or of the swinging lanterns and banners of Chinatown in San Francisco
and Mott street in New York; or of the Italians of Mulberry Bend in
the latter city; or of the alternating stretches on a long railway
journey of forest and prairie, yellow corn-fields and sandy desert; or
of many other classes and conditions which are by no means void of
material for the artist in pen or brush. All these lend hues that are
anything but prosaic to my kaleidoscopic recollections of the United
States; but more than all these, _the_ characteristically picturesque
feature of American life, stands out the omnipresent negro. It was a
thrill to have one's boots blackened by a coloured "professor" in an
alley-way of Boston, and to hear his richly intoned "as shoh's you're
bawn." It was a delight to see the negro couples in the Public Garden,
conducting themselves and their courting, as Mr. Howells has well
remarked, with infinitely more restraint and refinement than their
Milesian compeers, or to see them passing out of the Charles-street
Church in all the Sunday bravery of broadcloth coats, shiny hats,
wonderfully laundered skirts of snowy whiteness, and bodices of all
the hues of the rainbow. And all through the Union their glossy black
faces and gleaming white teeth shed a kind of dusky radiance over the
traveller's path. Who but can recall with gratitude the expansive
geniality and reassuring smile of the white-coated negro waiter, as
compared with the supercilious indifference, if not positive rudeness,
of his pale colleague? And what will ever efface the mental kodak of
George (not Sambo any more) shuffling rapidly into the dining-room,
with his huge flat palm inverted high over his head and bearing a
colossal tray heaped up with good things for the guest under his
charge? And shall I ever forget the grotesque gravity of the negro
brakeman in Louisiana, with his tall silk hat? or the pair of gloves
pathetically shared between two neatly dressed negro youths in a
railway carriage in Georgia? or the pickaninnies slumbering sweetly in
old packing-cases in a hut at Jacksonville, while their father
thrummed the soft guitar with friendly grin? It has always seemed to
me a reproach to American artists that they fill the air with sighs
over the absence of the picturesque in the United States, while almost
totally overlooki