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 overlooking the fine flesh-tones and gay dressing of the
coloured brother at their elbow.

The most conventional society of America is apt to be more or less
shrouded by the pall of monotony that attends convention elsewhere,
but typical American society--the society of the great mass of
Americans--shows distinctly more variety than that of England. In
social meetings, as in business, the American is ever on the alert for
some new thing: and the brain of every pretty girl is cudgelled in
order to provide some novelty for her next party. Hence the
progressive euchre, the "library" parties, the "shadow" dances, the
conversation parties, and the long series of ingenious games, the
adoption of which, for some of us at least, has done much to lighten
the deadly dulness of English "small and earlies." Even the