If all the negroes in Kings Port were like Daddy Ben, Mrs. Gregory St. Michael would not have spoken of having them “to deal with,” and the girl behind the counter would not have been thrown into such indignation when she alluded to their conceit and ignorance.  Daddy Ben had, so far from being puffed up by the appointment in the Custom House, disapproved of this.  I had heard enough about the difference between the old and new generations of the negro of Kings Port to believe it to be true, and I had come to discern how evidently it lay at the bottom of many things here:  John Mayrant and his kind were a band united by a number of strong ties, but by nothing so much as by their hatred of the modern negro in their town.  Yes, I was obliged to believe that the young Kings Port African left to freedom and the ballot, was a worse African than his slave parents; but this afternoon brought me a taste of it more pungent than all the assurances in the world.

I bought my kettle-supporter, and learned from the robber who sold it to me (Kings Port prices for “old things” are the most exorbitant that I know anywhere) that a carpenter lived not far from Mrs. Trevise’s boarding-house, and that he would make for me the box in which I could pack my various purchases.

“That is, if he’s working this week,” added the robber.

“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!”