little locked red glass money-box just below the
driver's seat, and where he can see what you
put in— though he seems generally, I observed, to
trust to a passenger's honour. You ring the same
bell, if you want to stop. On the outside, these
omnibuses are generally adorned with paintings
of Indian chiefs, portraits of Knickerbocker
and Washington, allegorical figures of Liberty
waving  "the star-spangled banner" over a very
blue and narrow Atlantic. I believe that sometimes
when Cuban planters, or old irascible,
controversial, and rather pompous Louisiana
gentlemen owning "cotton hands" are present,
there is a stir made if a negro gets into
a street car; but this, within my knowledge,
seldom happens in the North, though sometimes
rowdies, black sheep themselves, excited by
liquor, have been known to try and turn out
black passengers. The very last time I was in
a New York street car, a perfect flock of blacks
got in. We were coming from the Central
Park to Broadway, a long distance, past several
old Dutch-named streets, and I had plenty of
time to watch the passengers' behaviour.

Opposite me sat a very poor old grey negro-
plasterer, with his bag of tools at his feet; there
were spots of whitewash on his grizzly hair and
pathetically grotesque features. A poorer and
more jaded son of toil one could not meet
with; his thin blue linen clothes were patched
and spotted and threadbare; his eyes were
worn and pale; it was evident that the sands of
the poor old negro plasterer's life were all but
run. Death would soon claw him in his
clutch. He would soon be cast into the great
black dusthole where no colour can be seen,
for the sun is not there, neither the dawn, and
there king and slave sleep side by side without
grumbling at each other. No one pushed the
poor old negro, no one moved from windward
of him, no one struck him, no one turned up
his nose at him. The conductor took his fare,
as he did that of the other passengers. He
even chatted with the poor old soul about to
be gathered to his unknown black fathers.
There was nothing either disturbed or intrusive
about the old plasterer.

There were seated, also, not far from " this old
image of God cut in ebony," three young Creole
girls, smartly dressed, who, from the bandboxes
resting on their knees, I set down as milliners.
They, too, were quite at their ease, slightly
contemptuous of the old plasterer— not because
of his Ethiop skin, but because of his poverty
and grime, as I presume. Still there is no
doubt that had a hard ungracious Southern
man entered the car and complained of coloured
people's impudence, the conductor would at
once have sent the poor black sheep of the
human race to the right about, and turned them
on the outside balcony.

A propos of the separation of the black and
white pieces on the United States chessboard,
I will here mention what I saw one day in the
South. I was there in a time of blood-heat
excitement. There were rumours of negroes burning
villages and poisoning the wells in Texas. A
Wesleyan preacher, suspected of being an itinerant
Abolitionist agent, had just been hung by
Judge Lynch's stern myrmidons somewhere in
Missouri. I had pointed out to me, at every
railway station in Kentucky, spies watching to
see if any Northern travellers or English
passengers whispered or drew aside the negro
railway porters. I could not stir without finding
a sallow eye augering into me. I was afraid
almost to speak kindly to the negro slave
waiters at the hotels in South Carolina. The
local papers were full of news of Palmetto
regiments with red-starred banners enlisting
in Charleston; of Virginia men buying guns
and powder; of Alabama purchasing cannon;
of Louisiana burning to take arms. I looked
particularly, in all the Southern railroads and
stage cars, to see if the blacks were kept
carefully separated from the whites. I did not find
the distinction very severely maintained, though
there was generally a special car in which, partly
by prescription, and partly from custom, the
blacks seemed to congregate.

On an Alabama river-boat, I remember two
slaves, sturdy young men, just bought in a
New Orleans slave store, and going down
with their purchaser, a small holder, to
Montgomery. Scipio and Juba were dressed exactly
alike, in jacket and trousers of coarse blue cloth;
such suits as slave merchants are accustomed
to throw into the bargain, tending as they do
to set off their planter's purchase. There,
day after day, for I spent many days aboard
that terribly frail and dangerous steamer, the
'" Hickory Nut," sat, on a bale of cotton
just outside the dining saloon door, those twin
negroes, Juba and Scipio, like two black
turtle-doves; always in the same place from
morning till night; always whispering in the same
quiet, passionless, imperturbable way, their
conjectures, I suppose, about their new master and
his plantation, or quiet sarcasms on the last
master, now probably employed in liberally
dispensing tobacco-juice over the quays of New
Orleans. We " wooded," we glided on, we stuck
on sand-banks, we got off sand-banks, still the
twin ravens sat whispering on the cotton bales.
It was a great relief to me when suddenly at
"Nash's landing" the master got out, followed
abjectly and gravely by the two blacks: Scipio
honoured by his trunk: Juba by his carpet-bag
and umbrella. They passed up the red-sand
cutting in the steep river bank, and disappeared
down a distant street. But I have every reason
to suppose that Mr. Ezra Harbottle is still
wandering over the world, followed at a respectful
distance by Scipio and Juba. For, a week after
they left the boat, I met the three in Montgomery,
walking processionally in exactly the same
manner—  only, this time Scipio carried a green
parrot in a brass cage, and Juba a hat-box and
a rifle.

To return to my subject of street railroads.
I saw them in full operation, not only in New
York, but also in Boston and Philadelphia.
The latter city is divided by streets intersecting
each other at right angles. Here, if anywhere,