Dissenting chapel combines the Christy minstrel with Messieurs Moody and
Sankey; and the well-peppered palaver-sauce of home cookery reappears in
hotly spiced, bitterly pious sermons and 'experiences;' in shouts of
'Amen!' 'Glory!' and 'Hallelujah!' and in promiscuous orders to 'Hol' de
fort.' Right well do I remember while the rival pilots, Messieurs Elliot
and Johnson, were shamelessly perjuring themselves in the police-court,
[Footnote: _Wanderings in West Africa_, i. pp. 256-58.] the junior
generation on the other side of the building, separated by the thinnest of
party-walls, was refreshing itself with psalms and spiritual songs.

We went to hear the psalmody. Ascending the staircase in the gable
opposite the court-house, we passed down the hall, and saw through the
open door the young idea at its mental drill in the hands of a pedagogue,
apparently one of the [Greek: _anaimosarka_], who, ghastly white and
thatched with Paganini hair, sat at the head of the room, the ruling body
of the unruly rout. Down the long length, whose whitewashed walls were
garnished with inscriptions, legal, moral, and religious, all sublime as
far as size went, were ranged parallel rows of _négrillons_ in the vast
costumal variety of a ragged school. They stood bolt upright, square to
the fore, in the position of ' 'tention,' their naked toes disposed at an
angle of 60º, with fingers close to the seams of their breeches (when not
breekless), heads up and eyes front. Face and body were motionless, as if
cast in ebony: nothing moved but the saucer-like white eyes and the
ivory-lined mouths, from whose ample lips and gape issued a prodigious
volume of sound. Native assistants, in sable skins and yellowish white
chokers, carrying music-scores and armed with canes, sloped through the
avenues, occasionally halting to frown down some delinquent, whose body
was not perfectly motionless, and whose soul was not wholly fixed upon the
development of sacred time and tune. I have no doubt that they sang--