A few days ago, I was giving an order to a tradesman in the Strand--_not far from Warren’s_--when, to the utter surprise and disconcertment of the master of the shop, a poor African stepped in from the street, and, with an obsequious bow, made an offer of his sable services for a term of years.
[Illustration: “MASSA, YOU WANT A ’PRENTICE?”]
It would require a far better artist than myself to do justice to the scene which ensued on so unusual an application. The late Elia, in his Essay on “Imperfect Sympathies,” has alluded to the natural repugnance of the pale faces to the dark ones. “In the negro countenance,” he says, “you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces, or rather masks, that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls ‘these images of God cut in ebony.’ But I should not like to associate with them--to share my meals and my good-nights with them--because they are black.” Such a feeling is truly an imperfect sympathy, but my Strand shopkeeper evidently went beyond the essayist, and regarded “the nigger” with a positive antipathy. “A good horse,” says the proverb, “cannot be of a bad colour,” but I could not help feeling that a good man might be of an unfortunate complexion, howbeit, of a hue which wears well, washes well, does not fly, and, moreover, hides the dirt. So far from being able to endure a moor as his companion, the master tradesman could not look upon him as fit to be his subordinate. The mere possibility of such a connexion had never occurred to him, or assuredly, to the advertisement in the window for an apprentice, he would have added “a White will be preferred,” or “No African need apply.” In the meantime, it was sufficiently obvious that, even if indentured, a Hottentot would never be “treated as one of the family.” Whilst the master stared an unequivocal rejection, his wife looked over his shoulder at the applicant, with all the _physical_ expression in her countenance, of the anticipation of a black dose; the little boy took fright and tried to bolt; the baby even set its infantine face against the adoption, and the very dog barked and growled at the intruder as at a breed that was vermin. The result of such a scrutiny needs hardly to be told; the poor candidate was unanimously blackballed to his face, and recommended, unceremoniously, to make himself as scarce as a swan of the same complexion.