“The great proportion of them don't want anything at all,” Mr. Goodenough answered, “but have merely come off for amusement. Some of them come to be hired, some to carry luggage, others to tout for the boatmen below. Look at those respectable negresses coming up the gangway now. They are washerwomen, and will take our clothes ashore and bring them on board again this afternoon before we start.” “It seems running rather a risk,” Frank said. “No, you will see they all have testimonials, and I believe it is perfectly safe to intrust things to them.” Mr. Goodenough and Frank now prepared to go on shore, but this was not easily accomplished, for there was a battle royal among the boatmen whose craft thronged at the foot of the ladder. Each boat had about four hands, three of whom remained on board her, while the fourth stood upon the ladder and hauled at the painter to keep the boat to which he belonged alongside. As out of the twenty boats lying there not more than two could be at the foot of the ladder together, the conflict was a desperate one. All the boatmen shouted, “Here, sar. This good boat, sar. You come wid me, sar,” at the top of their voices, while at the same time they were hard at work pulling each other's boats back and pushing their own forward. So great was the struggle as Frank and Mr. Goodenough approached the gangway, so great the crowd upon the ladder, that one side of the iron bar from which the ladder chains depend broke in two, causing the ladder to drop some inches and giving a ducking to those on the lower step, causing shouts of laughter and confusion. These rose into perfect yells of amusement when one of the sailors suddenly loosed the ladder rope, letting five or six of the negroes into the water up to their necks. So intense was the appreciation by the sable mind of this joke that the boatmen rolled about with laughter, and even the victims, when they had once scrambled into their boats, yelled like people possessed. “They are just like children,” Mr. Goodenough said. “They are always either laughing or quarreling. They are good natured and passionate, indolent, but will work hard for a time; clever up to a certain point, densely stupid beyond. The intelligence of an average negro is about equal to that of a European child of ten years old. A few, a very few, go beyond this, but these are exceptions, just as Shakespeare was an exception to the ordinary intellect of an Englishman. They are fluent talkers, but their ideas are borrowed. They are absolutely without originality, absolutely without inventive power. Living among white men, their imitative faculties enable them to attain a considerable amount of civilization. Left alone to their own devices they retrograde into a state little above their native savagery.”