hich was playing a 'combination tune,' near the Grand Stand,
half a mile off.

To the music of tom-tom and chac-chac, the coloured folk would dance
perpetually till ten o'clock, after which time the rites of Mylitta
are silenced by the policeman, for the sake of quiet folk in bed.
They are but too apt, however, to break out again with fresh din
about one in the morning, under the excuse--'Dis am not last night,
Policeman. Dis am 'nother day.'

Well: but is the nightly tom-tom dance so much more absurd than the
nightly ball, which is now considered an integral element of white
civilisation? A few centuries hence may not both of them be looked
back on as equally sheer barbarisms?

These tom-tom dances are not easily seen. The only glance I ever
had of them was from the steep slope of once beautiful Belmont.
'Sitting on a hill apart,' my host and I were discoursing, not 'of
fate, free-will, free-knowledge absolute,' but of a question almost
as mysterious--the doings of the Parasol-ants who marched up and
down their trackways past us, and whether these doings were guided
by an intellect differing from ours, only in degree, but not in
kind. A hundred yards below we espied a dance in a negro garden; a
few couples, mostly of women, pousetting to each other with violent
and ungainly stampings, to the music of tom-tom and chac-chac, if
music it can be called. Some power over the emotions it must have;
for the Negroes are said to be gradually maddened by it; and white
people have told me that its very monotony, if listened to long, is
strangely exciting, like the monotony of a bagpipe drone, or of a
drum. What more went on at the dance we could not see; and if we
had tried, we should probably not have been allowed to see. The
Negro is chary of admitting white men to his amusements; and no
wonder. If a London ballroom were suddenly invaded by Phoebus,
Ares, and Hermes, such as Homer drew them, they would probably be
unwelcome guests; at least in the eyes of the gentlemen. The latter
would, I suspect, thoroughly sympathise with the Negro in the old
story, intelligible enough to those who know what is the favourite
food of a West Indian chicken.

'Well, John, so they gave a dignity ball on the estate last night?'

'Yes, massa, very nice ball. Plenty of pretty ladies, massa.'

'Why did you not ask me, John? I like to look at pretty ladies as
well as you.'

'Ah, massa: when cockr