But for that, many of them would have been remarkably handsome.

These fiendish clothes, together with the proper lounging gait, good-natured face, happy air, and easy laugh, made them precise counterparts of our American blacks; often where all the other aspects were strikingly and harmoniously and thrillingly African, a flock of these natives would intrude, looking wholly out of place, and spoil it all, making the thing a grating discord, half African and half American.
One Sunday in King William's Town a score of colored women came mincing across the great barren square dressed--oh, in the last perfection of fashion, and newness, and expensiveness, and showy mixture of unrelated colors,--all just as I had seen it so often at home; and in their faces and their gait was that languishing, aristocratic, divine delight in their finery which was so familiar to me, and had always been such a satisfaction to my eye and my heart.

I seemed among old, old friends; friends of fifty years, and I stopped and cordially greeted them.

They broke into a good-fellowship laugh, flashing their white teeth upon me, and all answered at once.

I did not understand a word they said.