d upon this he announced with as much bitterness as if he had
been John Mayrant or any of his aunts, "That's what Boston philanthropy
has done for him."

I dared up at this. "I suppose that's a Southern argument for
reestablishing slavery."

"I am not Southern; Breslau is my native town, and I came from New York
here to live five years ago. I've seen what your emancipation has done
for the black, and I say to you, my friend, honest I don't know a fool
from a philanthropist any longer."

He had much right upon his side; and it can be seen daily that
philanthropy does not always walk hand-in-hand with wisdom. Does
anything or anybody always walk so? Moreover, I am a friend to not many
superlatives, and have perceived no saying to be more true than the one
that extremes meet: they meet indeed, and folly is their meeting-place.
Nor could I say in the case of the negro which folly were the more
ridiculous;--that which expects a race which has lived no one knows
how many thousand years in mental nakedness while Confucius, Moses,
and Napoleon were flowering upon adjacent human stems, should put
on suddenly the white man's intelligence, or that other folly which
declares we can do nothing for the African, as if Hampton had not
already wrought excellent things for him. I had no mind to enter
into all the inextricable error with this Teuton, and it was he who
continued:--

"Oh, these Boston philanthropists; oh, these know-it-alls! Why don't
they stay home? Why do they come down here to worry us with their
ignorance? See here, my friend, let me show you!"

He rushed about his shop in a search of distraught eagerness, and with
a multitude of small exclamations, until, screeching jubilantly once,
he pounced upon a shabby and learned-looking volume. This he brought me,
thrusting it with his trembling fingers between my own, and shuffling
the open pages. But when the apparently right one was found, he
exclaimed, "No, I have better! and dashed away to a pile of pamphlets
on the floor, where he began to plough and harrow. Wondering if I was
closeted with a maniac, I looked at the book in my passive hand, and saw
diagrams of various bones to me unknown, and men's names of which I
was equally ignorant--Mivart, Topinard, and more,--but at last that
of Huxley. But this agreeable sight was spoiled at once by the quite
horrible words Nycticebidoe, platyrrhine, catarrhine, from which I
raised my eyes to see him coming at me with two pamp