"What else would he be doing?"
"It may be his week for getting drunk on what he earned the week before."

And 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 pamphlets, and scolding as he came.

"Are you educated, yes? Have been to college, yes? Then perhaps you will
understand."

Certainly I understood immediately that he and his pamphlets were as bad
as the book, or worse, in their use of a vocabulary designed to cause

almost any listener the gravest inconvenience. Common Eocene ancestors
occurred at the beginning of his lecture; and I believed that if it got

no stronger than this, I could at least preserve the appearance of
comprehending him; but it got stronger, and at sacro-iliac notch I may

say, without using any grossly exaggerated expression, that I became
unconscious. At least, all intelligence left me. When it returned, he was

saying.--
"But this is only the beginning. Come in here to my crania and jaws."

Evidently he held me hypnotized, for he now hurried me unresisting
through a back door into a dark little where he turned up the gas, and I

saw shelves as in a museum, to one of which he led me. I suppose that it
was curiosity that rendered me thus sheep-like. Upon the shelf were a

number of skulls and jaws in admirable condition and graded arrangement,
beginning to the left with that flat kind of skull which one associates

with gorillas. He resumed his scolding harangue, and for a few brief
moments I understood him. Here, told by themselves, was as much of the

story of the skulls as we know, from manlike apes through glacial man to
the modern senator or railroad president. But my intelligence was

destined soon to die away again.
"That is the Caucasian skull: your skull," he said, touching a specimen

at the right.
"Interesting," I murmured. "I'm afraid I know nothing about skulls."

"But you shall know someding before you leave," he retorted, wagging his
head at me; and this time it was not the book, but a specimen, that he

pushed into my grasp. He gave it a name, not as bad as platyrrhine, but I
feared worse was coming; then he took it away from me, gave me another

skull, and while I obediently held it, pronounced something quite beyond
me.

"And what is the translation of that?" he demanded excitedly.
"Tell me," I feebly answered.

He shouted with overweening triumph: "The translation of that is South
Carolina nigger. Notice well this so egcellent specimen. Prognathous,

megadont, platyrrhine."
"Ha! Platyrrhine!" I saluted the one word I recognized as I drowned.

"You have said it yourself!" was his extraordinary answer;--for what had
I said? Almost as if he were going to break into a dance for joy, he took

the Caucasian skull and the other two, and set the three together by
themselves, away from the rest of the collection. The picture which they

thus made spoke more than all the measurements and statistics which he
now chattered out upon me, reading from his book as I contemplated the

skulls. There was a similarity of shape, a kinship there between the
three, which stared you in the face; but in the contours of vaulted

skull, the projecting jaws, and the great molar teeth--what was to be
seen? Why, in every respect that the African departed from the Caucasian,

he departed in the direction of the ape! Here was zoology mutely but
eloquently telling us why there had blossomed no Confucius, no Moses, no

Napoleon, upon that black stem; why no Iliad, no Parthenon, no Sistine
Madonna, had ever risen from that tropic mud.

The collector touched my sleeve. "Have you now learned someding about
skulls, my friend? Will you invite those Boston philanthropists to stay

home? They will get better results in civilization by giving votes to
monkeys than teaching Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to riggers."

Retaliation rose in me. "Haven't you learned to call them negroes?" I
remarked. But this was lost upon the Teuton. I was tempted to tell him

that I was no philanthropist, and no Bostonian, and that he need not
shout so loud, but my more dignified instincts restrained me. I withdrew

my sleeve from his touch (it was this act of his, I think, that had most
to do with my displeasure), and merely bidding him observe that the

enormous price of the kettle-supporter had been reduced for me by his
exhibition to a bagatelle, I left the shop of the screaming anatomist--or

Afropath, or whatever it may seem most fitting that he should be called.
I bore the kettle-supporter with me, tied up objectionably in newspaper,

and knotted with ungainly string; and it was this bundle which prevented
my joining the girl behind the counter, and ending by a walk with a young

lady the afternoon that had begun by a walk with two old ones. I should
have liked to make my confession to her. She was evidently out for the

sake of taking the air, and had with her no companion save the big curly
white dog; confession would have been very agreeable; but I looked again

at my ugly newspaper bundle, and turned in a direction that she was not
herself pursuing.

Twice, as I went, I broke into laughter over my interview in the shop,
which I fear has lost its comical quality in the relating. To enter a

door and come serenely in among dingy mahogany and glass objects, to
bargain haughtily for a brass bauble with the shopkeeper, and to have a

few exchanged remarks suddenly turn the whole place into a sort of bedlam
with a gibbering scientistdashing skulls at me to prove his fixed idea,

and myself quite furious--I laughed more than twice; but, by the time I
had approached the neighborhood of the carpenter's shop, another side of

it had brought reflection to my mind. Here was a foreigner to whom
slavery and the Lost Cause were nothing, whose whole association with the

South had begun but five years ago; and the race question had brought his
feelings to this pitch! He had seen the Kings Port negro with the eyes of

the flesh, and not with the eyes of theory, and as a result the reddest
rag for him was pale beside a Boston philanthropist!

Nevertheless, I have said already that I am no lover of superlatives, and
in doctrine especially is this true. We need not expect a Confucius from

the negro, nor yet a Chesterfield; but I am an enemy also of that blind
and base hate against him, which conducts nowhere save to the

de-civilizing of white and black alike. Who brought him here? Did he
invite himself? Then let us make the best of it and teach him, lead him,