NEGRO LANCES. 265 



To tlie music of tom-tom and chac-cliac, the coloured folk 

 would dance perpetually till ten o'clock, after which time the 

 rites of Mylitta are silenced by the policeman, for the sake of 

 quiet folk in bed. They are but too apt, however, to break 

 out again with fresh din about one in the^morning, under 

 the excuse '' Dis am not last night, Policeman. Dis am 

 'nother dav." 



Well : but is the nightly tom-tom dance so much more 

 absurd than the nightly ball, which is now considered an 

 integral element of white civilization? A few centuries 

 hence may not both of them be looked back on as equally 

 sheer barbarisms ? 



These tom-tom dances are not easily seen. The only glance 

 I ever had of them was from the steep slope of once beautiful 

 Belmont. "Sitting on a hill apart," my host and I were 

 discoursing, not " of fate, free-will, free-knowledge absolute," 

 but of a question almost as mysterious the doings of the 

 l^arasol-ants who marched up and down their trackways past 

 us, and whether these doinfrs were ouided bv an intellect 

 differing from ours, onlv in decfree, but not in kind. A lum- 

 dred yards below ^ve espied a dance in a Negro garden ; a few 

 couples, mostly of w^omen, pousetting to each other with 

 violent and ungainly stampings, to the music of tom-tom and 

 chac-chac, if music it can be called. Some power over the 

 emotions it must have : for the Neirros are said to be f]:raduallv 



