Native assistants, in sable skins and yellowish white
chokers, carrying music-scores and armed with canes, sloped through the
avenues, occasionally halting to frown down some delinquent, whose body
was not perfectly motionless, and whose soul was not wholly fixed upon the
development of sacred time and tune. I have no doubt that they sang--
The sun, the moon, and all the stars, &c.
precisely in the same spirit as if they had been intoning--
Peter Hill! poor soul!
Flog 'um wife, oh no! oh no!
and that famous anthropological assertion--
Eve ate de appel,
Gib one to daddy Adam;
And so came mi-se-ry
Up-on dis worl'.
_Chorus (bis)_ Oh sor-row, oh sor-row!
Tri-bu-la-tion
Until sal-va-tion day.
It is a pity that time and toil should be thus wasted. The negro child,
like the Hindu, is much sharper, because more precocious, than the
European; at six years he will become a good penman; in fact, he
promises more than he can perform. Reaching the age of puberty, his
capacity for progress suddenly disappears, the physical reason being
well known, and the 'cute lad becomes a _dummer Junge_. Mrs. Melville
thus describes her small servant-girl from one of these schools: 'She
looks almost nine years old; and, as far as reading goes, she knows
nothing more than her alphabet; can repeat the Prayer-Book Catechism by
rote, and one or two hymns, utterly ignorant all the while of the import
of a single word.
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