William Winter soon became a great personal friend of ours, and visited us in England. He was one of the few _sad_ people I met in America. He could have sat upon the ground and "told sad stories of the deaths of kings" with the best. In England he loved going to see graveyards, and knew where every poet was buried. He was very familiar with the poetry of the _immediate_ past--Cowper, Coleridge, Gray, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and the rest. He _liked_ us, so everything we did was right to him. He could not help being guided entirely by his feelings. If he disliked a thing, he had no use for it. Some men can say, "I hate this play, but of its kind it is admirable." Willie Winter could never take that unemotional point of view. His children came to stay with me in London. When we were all coming home from the theatre one night after Faust (the year must have been 1886), I said to little Willie: "Well, what do you think of the play?" "Oh my!" said he, "it takes the cake." "Takes the _cake_," said his little sister scornfully. "It takes the ice-cream!" "Won't you give me a kiss?" said Henry to the same little girl one night. "No, I _won't_, with all that blue stuff on your face." (He was made up for Mephistopheles.) Then, after a pause, "But why--why don't you _take_ it!" She was only five years old at the time! _Discovering the Southern Darkey_ For quite a while during the first tour I stayed in Washington with my friend, Miss Olive Seward, and all the servants of that delightful household were coloured. This was my first introduction to the negroes, whose presence in the country makes America seem more foreign than anything to European eyes. They are more sharply divided into high and low types than white people, and are not in the least alike in their types. It is safe to call any coloured man "George." They all love it, perhaps because of George Washington; and most of them are really named George. I never met with such perfect service as they can give. _Some_ of them are delightful. The beautiful, full voice of the "darkey" is so attractive--so soothing, and they are so deft and gentle. Some of the women are beautiful, and all the young appeared to me to be well-formed. As for the babies! I washed two or three little piccaninnies when I was in the South, and the way they rolled their gorgeous eyes at me was "too cute," which means, in British-English, "fascinating." At the Washington house, the servants danced a cake-walk for me--the coloured cook, a magnificent type, who "took the cake," saying, "That was because I chose a good handsome boy to dance with, Missie." They sang, too. Their voices were beautiful--with such illimitable power, yet as sweet as treacle. The little page boy had a pet of a woolly head--Henry once gave him a tip, a "fee," in American-English, and said: "There, that's for a new wig when this one is worn out," gently pulling the astrakhan-like hair. The tip would have bought him many wigs, I think!