Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/165

Rh late in the afternoon; I am waiting in expectation and impatience. Will there be a dance or no? I fear that some pretext will be found for changing the dance into labour. I confess that I shall be very much annoyed if it is so; for the dance has been promised me, and the poor people need enlivening; neither should I allow them to dance to no purpose. There—the African drum! There will be a dance.—I hasten to witness it.

Later.—The dance did not this time take place under a shady almond-tree, but in the hot court of the bohea. The musicians were stationed with their drums on the shady side of the kitchen. There was merely a small company of dancers, and the dance was of the same kind as that at Ariadne, and presented no new feature of interest; until an elderly Congo negro, called Carlo Congo, entered with his herculean chest into the dance. He ordered the drummers to beat a new tune, and to this he performed a dance, which, with its bendings, its evolutions, and tremulosities would have told well in a ballet of the Paris opera; that is to say, in the person of a satyr or faun, for the dance had no higher character; but it was admirable from the power of the dancer, his agility, flexibility, bold transitions, and the wild, picturesque beauty of his evolutions. This was the Congo dance; but Carlo Congo could not execute it in its full perfection; wearied by four months' labour, day and night, his limbs were evidently deficient in the needful power; he was obliged to pause many times to rest, and though he soon recommenced, he again came to a stand, shaking his head good-humouredly, as if he would say—“No! it will not do!” His countenance had that expression of power and sensibility which I have so often seen among the negroes; he wore a little cotton cap on his head, and a necklace of blue glass beads round his throat; the upper portion of the body and the muscular arms were bare; and their form, and the development of the muscles, during the