The laugh was against him.

“Mawse Chawlie,” she said again, “w’a’s dis I yeh ’bout dat Eu’ope country? ’s dat true de niggas is all free in Eu’ope!”

Doctor Keene replied that something like that was true.

“Well, now, Mawse Chawlie, I gwan t’ ass you a riddle.  If dat is so, den fo’ w’y I yeh folks bragg’n ’bout de ‘stayt o’ s’iety in Eu’ope’?”

The mincing drollery with which she used this fine phrase brought another peal of laughter.  Nobody tried to guess.

“I gwan tell you,” said the marchande; “’t is becyaze dey got a ’fixed wuckin’ class.’” She sputtered and giggled with the general ha, ha.  “Oh, ole Clemence kin talk proctah, yass!”

She made a gesture for attention.

“D’ y’ ebber yeh w’at de cya’ge-hoss say w’en ’e see de cyaht-hoss tu’n loose in de sem pawstu’e wid he, an’ knowed dat some’ow de cyaht gotteh be haul’?  W’y ‘e jiz snawt an’ kick up ‘is heel’”—­she suited the action to the word—­“an’ tah’ roun’ de fiel’ an’ prance up to de fence an’ say:  ‘Whoopy! shoo! shoo! dis yeh country gittin’ too free!’”

“Oh,” she resumed, as soon as she could be heard, “white folks is werry kine.  Dey wants us to b’lieb we happy—­dey wants to b’lieb we is.  W’y, you know, dey ‘bleeged to b’lieb it—­fo’ dey own cyumfut.  ’Tis de sem weh wid de preache’s; dey buil’ we ow own sep’ate meet’n-houses; dey b’liebs us lak it de bess, an’ dey knows dey lak it de bess.”

The laugh at this was mostly her own.  It is not a laughable sight to see the comfortable fractions of Christian communities everywhere striving, with sincere, pious, well-meant, criminal benevolence, to make their poor brethren contented with the ditch.  Nor does it become so to see these efforts meet, or seem to meet, some degree of success.  Happily man cannot so place his brother that his misery will continue unmitigated.  You may dwarf a man to the mere stump of what he ought to be, and yet he will put out green leaves.  “Free from care,” we benignly observe of the dwarfed classes of society; but we forget, or have never thought, what a crime we commit when we rob men and women of their cares.

To Clemence the order of society was nothing.  No upheaval could reach to the depth to which she was sunk.  It is true, she was one of the population.  She had certain affections toward people and places; but they were not of a consuming sort.

As for us, our feelings, our sentiments, affections, etc., are fine and keen, delicate and many; what we call refined.  Why?  Because we get them as we get our old swords and gems and laces—­from our grandsires, mothers, and all.  Refined they are—­after centuries of refining.  But the feelings handed down to Clemence had come through ages of African savagery; through fires that do not refine, but that blunt and blast and blacken and char; starvation, gluttony, drunkenness, thirst, drowning,