"I have seen the negro at work," so Harris once stated, "and I have seen him at play; I have attended his corn-shuckings, his dances, and his frolics; I have heard him give the wonderful melody of his songs to the winds; I have heard him give barbaric airs to the quills" (that is to say, to the Pan-pipes); "I have heard him scrape jubilantly on the fiddle; I have seen him blow wildly on the bugle, and beat enthusiastically on the triangle; but I have never heard him play on the banjo." Mr. George W. Cable thereupon came forward with his evidence to the effect that, altho the banjo was to be found occasionally on a plantation, it was far less frequently seen than the violin. It will be noted that Harris was speaking of the Georgian negro, and that Mr. Cable was talking about the negro in Louisiana; and perhaps the true habitat of the banjo is to be found farther north and near to the border States. At any rate, there is a footnote to one of Thomas Jefferson's 'Notes on Virginia' (published in 1784), which informs us that the instrument proper to the slaves of the Old Dominion is "the banjar, which they brought hither from Africa, and which is the origin of the guitar, its chords being precisely the four lower chords of the guitar." Now and again some one negro minstrel did make a serious study of a negro type; such a performer was J. W. McAndrews, the "Watermelon Man." But the most of them were content to be comic without any effort to catch the special comicality of the darky; and sometimes they strayed so completely from the path as to indulge in songs in an alleged Irish brogue or in a dislocated German dialect. Now, nothing could well be conceived more incongruously inartistic than a white man blacked up into the semblance of a negro, and then impertinently caroling an impudent Irish lyric. Yet the general neglect of the opportunities for a more accurate presentation of negro characteristics is to be seen in the strange fact that the minstrels failed to perceive the possible popularity of rag-time tunes, and failed also to put the cake-walk on the stage. Even at the height of its vogue in the mid years of the nineteenth century, negro-minstrelsy did not occupy its own field, and did not try to raise therein the varied flowers of which they had the seed.