Instead of cultivating the tempting possibilities which lay before them, and devoting themselves to a loving delineation of the colored people who make up a tenth of our population, they turned aside to devote themselves to the spectacular elaboration of their original entertainment. The clog-dances became most intricate and more mechanical--and thereby still more remote from the buck-and-wing dancing of the real negro. The First Part was presented with accompaniments of Oriental magnificence and of variegated glitter. The chorus was enlarged; the musicians were multiplied; the End-men operated in relays; and at last the bass-drum which towered aloft over Haverly's Mastodon Minstrels bore the boastful legend: "40. Count Them. 40." And when the suspicious spectator obeyed this command, he discovered to his surprise that the vaunt was more than made good since he had a full view of at least half a dozen performers in addition to the promised twoscore. At the apex of his inflated prosperity Haverly invaded Germany with his mastodonic organization; and one result of his visit was probably still further to confuse the Teutonic misinformation about the American type, which seems often to be a curious composite photograph of the red men of Cooper, the black men of Mrs. Stowe, and the white men of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. And it was reported at the time that another and more immediate result of this rash foray beyond the boundaries of the English-speaking race was that Haverly was, for a while, in danger of arrest by the police for a fraudulent attempt to deceive the German public, because he was pretending to present a company of _negro_ minstrels, whereas his performers were actually white men! It should be recorded that while the vogue lasted, there did come into existence sundry troops of minstrels whose members were all of them actually colored men, altho they conformed to the convention set by those whom they were imitating and conscientiously disguised themselves with burnt cork, to achieve the sable uniformity temporarily attained by the ordinary negro minstrels. Perhaps the most obvious parallel of the blacking up of veritable colored men to follow the example of the white men who pretended to imitate the negro is to be found in the original performance of 'As You Like It,' on the Elizabethan stage, when the shaven boy-actor who impersonated Rosalind disguised himself as a lad, and then had to pretend to Orlando that he was a girl. IV