I step to one side, when pr-r-rt, my toe strikes
against it."

I edged slightly away from my companion with the disagreeable impression
that he was gone mad.

He went on;--"When I lived in the West Indies, the children of the
slaves, about my house, were treated with great kindness and indulgence.
They would come about my table at dessert, and often had little presents
given them. So they grew into objects of affection. But, out of several,
some, of course, took ill and died. I cannot tell you what grief it
caused me. Then this has happened several times, after the death of one
or other of my little favourites:--a bird has flown into the hall, and
into my sitting-room, and has hovered near me, and, after a while, has
flown away. For a few days it has regularly returned, and then finally
disappeared. I thought it was tenanted by the spirit of my lost
favourite, which had come to bid me farewell."

I drew nearer again to my companion. I felt I was in all events safe
from violence from him. And I contrasted, with humiliation, his
beautiful superstition with the commonplace remembrance of a school-boy
conviction of my own, one dark night, upon Blackheath, that a
direction-post was a ghost.

My friend had not, indeed, always been a dreamer: and although this is
no place to narrate his course of daring and hazardous adventure, on
which I am therefore silent, yet I wish to be allowed to re-establish
his credit for intelligence, by reporting the answer which he made, on
another occasion, to a question, as to what he thought of the
emancipation of the Negroes in our colonies. "The principle," answered
my friend, "was good, but you were in too great a hurry. Before giving
them freedom, you should have made them fit for it. They were not
impatient. Slavery is an African institution. Some outlay of public
money, and extreme care and prudence in your measures, would have
enabled you to secure their humane treatment in the interval. As fast
as they became innoculated with the wants and habits of civilised life,
you might have made _freedmen_ of the most advanced, and given them
official occupation, or allotted them land under proper conditions. One
sheep would have followed another. The fag-end you might have
emancipated together. Thirty or forty years, and a million of money,
would have done the thing. The results would have been, from first to
last, beneficial to the colonists. It would have set an example which
other nations