“You know the Franklins?”

“Of course:  Aunt Mina’s son—­what’s his name?—­is a sort of protege of yours, I believe:  what of him?”

“He is cleanly?”

“A nice question.  Doubtless.”

“Respectable?”

“What are you driving at?”

“Intelligent?”

“Most true.”

“Ambitious?”

“Or his looks belie him.”

“Faithful, trusty, active, helpful, in every way devoted to my father’s service and his work.”

“With Sancho, I believe it all because your worship says so.”

“Well, this man has just been discharged from my father’s employ because seven hundred and forty-two other men gave notice to quit if he remained.”

“The reason?”

“His skin.”

“The reason is not ’so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door, but it is enough.’  Of course they wouldn’t work with him, and my uncle Surrey, begging your pardon, should not have attempted anything so Quixotic.”

“His skin covering so many excellent qualities, and these qualities gaining recognition,—­that was the cause.  They worked with him so long as he was a servant of servants:  so soon as he demonstrated that he could strike out strongly and swim, they knocked him under; and, proving that he could walk alone, they ran hastily to shove him to the wall.”

“What! quoting my own words against me?”

“Anglo-Saxon says we are the masters:  we monopolize the strength and courage, the beauty, intelligence, power.  These creatures,—­what are they? poor, worthless, lazy, ignorant, good for nothing but to be used as machines, to obey.  When lo! one of these dumb machines suddenly starts forth with a man’s face; this creature no longer obeys, but evinces a right to command; and Anglo-Saxon speedily breaks him in pieces.”

“Come, Willie, I hope you’re not going to assert these people our equals,—­that would be too much.”

“They have no intelligence, Anglo-Saxon declares,—­then refuses them schools, while he takes of their money to help educate his own sons.  They have no ambition,—­then closes upon them every door of honorable advancement, and cries through the key-hole, Serve, or starve.  They cannot stand alone, they have no faculty for rising,—­then, if one of them finds foothold, the ground is undermined beneath him.  If a head is seen above the crowd, the ladder is jerked away, and he is trampled into the dust where he is fallen.  If he stays in the position to which Anglo-Saxon assigns him, he is a worthless nigger; if he protests against it, he is an insolent nigger; if he rises above it, he is a nigger not to be tolerated at all,—­to be crushed and buried speedily.”

“Now, Willie, ‘no more of this, an thou lovest me.’  I came not out to-day to listen to an abolition harangue, nor a moral homily, but to have a good time, to be civil and merry withal, if you will allow it.  Of course you don’t like Franklin’s discharge, and of course you have done something to compensate him.  I know—­you have found him another place.  No,—­you couldn’t do that?