Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/78

 African is usually gentle in temperament, and even in his lowest type of development has almost always an honest face; there is no look of concealment or hidden purpose in the large, confiding, open eye—open almost too far for comeliness, but still reassuring in its absence of all latent treachery. The dusky face of the African bears usually one of two several expressions—either a patient look of infinite and hopeless sadness, or a frank, reckless lightheartedness, breaking out into thoughtless jollity.

The faces of the two West Indian slaves were full as dusky, but far more repellent; traces of their fierce Spanish blood and temperament lurked in their long, narrow, vicious, half-shut eyes, which flashed their keen, malignant glances from beneath the heavy hanging eyelids; the swarthy lowering brow was narrow and retreating, and the whole lower portion of the face was sensuous in the extreme, the coarse, heavy, powerful jaws having the ferocity of the beast of prey, united to the low cunning of the monkey.

Having passed down the street to the