Mr. Sala objects very much to judging a whole class of people by a few street-corner or cross-road loungers.  The negro he found to be superstitious, just as we find them to-day.  Even educated negroes are apt to give credence to many stories which, on the face of them, appear ridiculous.  The words “Hoodoo” and “Mascot” have a meaning among these people of which we have only a dim conception, and when sickness enters a family the aid of an alleged doctor, who is often a charlatan of the worst character, is apt to be sought.  It will take several generations to work out this characteristic, and perhaps the greatest complaint the colored race has against those who formerly held them in subjection, is the way in which voodoo and supernatural stories were told ignorant slaves with a view to frightening them into obedience, and inciting them to extra exertions.

For absolute ignorance and apparent lack of human understanding, the negro loafer to be found around some of our Southern towns and depots may be quoted as a signal and quite amusing example.  The hat, as Mr. Sala humorously puts it, resembles an inverted coal scuttle or bucket without handles, and pierced by many holes.  It is something like the bonnet of a Brobdingnagian Quakeress, huge and flapped and battered, and fearful to look upon.

“Hang all this equipment,” this interesting writer goes on to say, “on the limbs of a tall negro of any age between sixteen and sixty, and then let him stand close to the scaffold-like platform of the depot shanty and let him loaf.  His attitude is one of complete and apathetic immobility.  He does not grin.  He may be chewing, but he does not smoke.  He does not beg; at least in so far as I observed him he stood in no posture and assumed no gestures belonging to the mendicant.  He looms at you with a dull, stony, preoccupied gaze, as though his thoughts were a thousand miles away in the unknown land; while once in every quarter of an hour or so he woke up to a momentary consciousness that he was a thing neither rich nor rare, and so wondered how in thunder he got there.  He is a derelict, a fragment of flotsam and jetsam cast upon the not too hospitable shore of civilization after the great storm had lashed the Southern sea to frenzy and the ship of slavery had gone to pieces forever.  Possibly he is a good deal more human than he looks, and if he chose to bestir himself and to address himself to articulate discourse, could tell you a great many things about his wants and wishes, his views and feelings on things in general which, to you, might prove little more than amazing.  As things go, he prefers to do nothing and to proffer no kind of explanation as to why he is standing there in a metaphorical mill pond very much ‘longer than he oughter.’”