long job, because black blood is much more
adhesive than white, and throws back with annoying persistence. When the
negro gets a religion he returns, directly as a hiving bee, to the first
instincts of his people. Just now a wave of religion is sweeping over
some of the Southern States. Up to the present, two Messiahs and one
Daniel have appeared; and several human sacrifices have been offered up
to these incarnations. The Daniel managed to get three young men, who he
insisted were Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, to walk into a blast
furnace; guaranteeing non-combustion. They did not return. I have seen
nothing of this kind, but I have attended a negro church. The
congregation were moved by the spirit to groans and tears, and one of
them danced up the aisle to the mourners' bench. The motive may have
been genuine. The movements of the shaken body were those of a Zanzibar
stick-dance, such as you see at Aden on the coal boats; and even as I
watched the people, the links that bound them to the white man snapped
one by one, and I saw before me--the _hubshi_ (the Woolly One) praying
to the God he did not understand. Those neatly dressed folk on the
benches, the grey-headed elder by the window, were savages--neither more
nor less. What will the American do with the negro? The South will not
consort with him. In some States miscegenation is a penal offence. The
North is every year less and less in need of his services. And he will
not disappear. He will continue as a problem. His friends will urge that
he is as good as the white man. His enemies ... it is not good to be a
negro in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

But this has nothing to do with San Francisco and her merry maidens, her
strong, swaggering men, and her wealth of gold and pride. They bore me
to a banquet in honour of a brave Lieutenant--Carlin, of the
_Vandalia_--who stuck by his ship in the great cyclone at Apia and
comported himself as an officer should. On that occasion--'twas at the
Bohemian Club--I heard oratory with the roundest of O's; and devoured a
dinner the memory of which will descend with me into the hungry grave.
There were about forty speeches delivered; and not one of them was
average or ordinary. It was my first introduction to the American Eagle
screaming for all it was worth. The Lieutenant's heroism served as a peg
from which those silver-tongued ones turned themselves loose and kicked.
They ransacked the clouds of sunset, the