One has to go down South to appreciate the colored man as he really is.  In the North he is apt to imitate the white man so much that he loses his unique personality.  In the Southern States, however, he can be found in all his original glory.  Here he can be regarded as a survival of preceding generations.  In the South, before the war, the truism that there is dignity in toil was scarcely appreciated at its full worth.  The negro understood, as if by instinct, that he ought to work for his white master, and that duties of every kind in the field, on the road and in the house, should be performed by him.  For a white man who worked he entertained feelings in which there was a little pity and a great deal of contempt.  He has never got over this feeling, or the feeling which his father before him had.  Down South to-day the expression “po’ white trash” is still full of meaning, and the words are uttered by the thick-lipped, woolly-headed critics with an emphasis and expression the very best white mimic has never yet succeeded in reproducing.

George Augustus Sala, one of England’s oldest and most successful descriptive writers, talks very entertainingly regarding the emancipated slave.  The first trip made to this country by the versatile writer referred to was during the war.

He returned home full of prejudices, and wrote up the country in that supercilious manner European writers are too apt to adopt in regard to America.  Several years later he made his second trip, and his experiences, as recorded in “America Revisited,” are much better reading, and much freer from prejudice.

“For full five and thirty years,” he writes, “had I been waiting to see the negro ‘standing in the mill pond.’  I saw him in all his glory and all his driving wretchedness at Guinneys, in the State of Virginia.  I own that for some days past the potential African, ‘standin’ in de mill pond longer than he oughter’ had been lying somewhat heavily on my conscience.  My acquaintance with our dark brethren since arriving in this country had not only been necessarily limited, but scarcely of a nature to give me any practical insight into his real condition since he has been a free man—­free to work or starve; free to become a good citizen or go to the devil, as he has gone, mundanely speaking, in Hayti and elsewhere.  Colored folks are few and far between in New York, and they have never, as a rule, been slaves, and are not even generally of servile extraction.  In Philadelphia they are much more numerous.  Many of the mulatto waiters employed in the hotels are strikingly handsome men, and on the whole the sable sons of Pennsylvania struck me as being industrious, well dressed, prosperous, and a trifle haughty in their intercourse with white folks.