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 "I do not think that Manning is a fair judge," replied Virginia.

"From what I have read," observed Sir Henry, in his somewhat pedantic manner, "I should say that it was very difficult to get a fair judgment on the negro question; there is the opinion of the man who has known him on the West Coast where he is pure savage, the opinion of the man who knows him as a recently liberated slave—Manning's opinion—the opinion of the man who knows him in the northern United States as a political if scarcely social equal, and then the opinions of people like ourselves who know him at his best, a finished product like Count Dessalines." Each of his points Sir Henry had carefully tallied upon his slender, white fingers: his thin, ascetic face, intellectual, broad browed, narrow of chin which was fringed with a square-cut beard of an open, separate-haired consistency and seemed less masculine than none; the whole face was flushed with the nervous shyness characteristic of him.

"It seems to me," he pursued, "that to talk at all intelligently upon the negro question a man must know the negro in all of his phases; to know him too well in any one alone, would be less advantageous than to have merely observed him casually in all; it is simply the case of the 'Ten Blind Men of Hindoostan' who went to see an elephant and decided that he resembled a rope, a tree, a fan, a spear, a wall, as different ones felt his tail, leg, ear, tusk, and I do not know what besides; you know the rhyme."

"Right," exclaimed Giles. "I have heard Manning say more than once that there is nobody who knows more of the African than he … yet he has never even seen 101