For “quite a while” during the first tour I stayed in Washington with my friend Miss Olive Seward, and all the servants of that delightful household were colored.  This was my first introduction to the negroes, whose presence more than anything else in the country, makes America seem foreign to European eyes.  They are more sharply divided into high and low types than white people, and are not in the least alike in their types.  It is safe to call any colored man “George.”  They all love it, perhaps because of George Washington, and most of them are really named George.  I never met such perfect service as they can give. Some of them are delightful.  The beautiful, full voice of the “darkey” is so attractive, so soothing, and they are so deft and gentle.  Some of the women are beautiful, and all the young appeared to me to be well-formed.  As for the babies!  I washed two or three little piccaninnies when I was in the South, and the way they rolled their gorgeous eyes at me was “too cute,” which means in British-English “fascinating.”

At the Washington house, the servants danced a cake-walk for me—­the colored cook, a magnificent type, who “took the cake,” saying, “that was because I chose a good handsome boy to dance with, Missie.”

They sang too.  Their voices were beautiful—­with such illimitable power, yet as sweet as treacle.

The little page-boy had a pet of a wooly head.  Henry once gave him a tip—­“fee,” as they call it in America—­and said:  “There, that’s for a new wig when this one is worn out,” gently pulling the astrakhan-like hair.  The tip would have bought him many wigs, I think!

“Why, Uncle Tom, how your face shines to-night!” said my hostess to one of the very old servants.

“Yes, Missie, glycerine and rose-water, Missie!”

He had taken some from her dressing-table to shine up his face in honor of me!  A shiny complexion is considered to be a great beauty among the negroes!  The dear old man!  He was very bent and very old; and looked like one of the logs that he used to bring in for the fire—­a log from some hoary, lichened tree whose life was long since past.  He would produce a pin from his head when you wanted one; he had them stuck in his pad of white wooly hair:  “Always handy then, Missie,” he would say.

“Ask them to sing ‘Sweet Violets,’ Uncle Tom.”

He was acting as a sort of master of the ceremonies at the entertainment the servants were giving me.

“Don’t think they know dat, Miss Olly.”

“Why, I heard them singing it the other night!” And she hummed the tune.

“Oh, dat was ‘Sweet Vio-letts,’ Miss Olly!”

Washington was the first city I had seen in America where the people did not hurry, and where the social life did not seem entirely the work of women.  The men asserted themselves here as something more than machines in the background untiringly turning out the dollars, while their wives and daughters give luncheons and teas at which only women are present.