“In Baltimore, where slavery existed until the promulgation of Lincoln’s proclamation, the colored people are plentiful.  I met a good many ragged, shiftless, and generally dejected negroes of both sexes, who appeared to be just the kind of waifs and strays who would stand in a mill pond longer than they ought to in the event of there being any convenient mill pond at hand.  But the better class darkeys, who have been domestic slaves in Baltimore families, seemed to retain all their own affectionate obsequiousness of manner and respectful familiarity.  Again, in Washington, the black man and his congeners seemed to be doing remarkably well.  At one of the quietest, most elegant and most comfortable hotels in the Federal Capital, I found the establishment conducted by a colored man, all of whose employes, from the clerks in the office to the waiters and chambermaids, were colored.  Our chambermaid was a delightful old lady, and insisted ere we left that we should give her a receipt for a real old English Christmas plum pudding.

“But these were not the mill pond folk of whom I was in quest.  They were of the South, as an Irishman in London is of Ireland, but not in it.  I had a craving to see whether any of the social ashes of slavery lived their wonted fires.  Away down South was the real object of my mission, and in pursuit of that mission I went on to Richmond.”

Mr. Sala proceeds to give a most amusing account of his ride from New York to Richmond, with various criticisms of sleeping-car accommodation, heartily endorsed by all American travelers who have read them.  Arriving at Richmond he asked the usual question:  “Is not the negro idle, thriftless and thievish?” From time immemorial it has been asserted that the laws of meum and tuum have no meaning for the colored man.  It is a joke current in more than one American city, that the police have standing orders to arrest every negro seen carrying a turkey or a chicken along the street.  In other words, the funny man would have us believe that the innate love of poultry in the Ethiopian’s breast is so great that the chances are against his having been possessed of sufficient force of character to pass a store or market where any birds were exposed for sale and not watched.

It is doubtless a libel on the colored race to state that even the majority of its members are chicken thieves by descent rather than inclination, just as it is a libel on their religion to insinuate that a colored camp meeting is almost certain to involve severe inroads into the chicken coops and roosts of the neighboring farmers.  Certain it is, however, that chicken stealing is one of the most dangerous causes of backsliding on the part of colored converts and enthusiastic singers of hymns in negro churches.  The case of the convert who was asked by his pastor, a week after his admission to the church, if he had stolen a chicken since his conversion, and who carefully concealed a stolen duck under his coat while he assured the good man that he had not, is an exaggerated one of course, but it is quoted as a good story in almost every State and city in the Union.