In silence he handed me a card--the one my housemaid had rejected--printed in Old English lettering, “Professor Samuel K. Curtis, Esq.” Mahaly’s child had evidently paid his “white folks” the compliment of incorporating their names with his own. “How nice!” I murmured. “But what are you professor of, Sam’l?” “The art of Terpsichore, Madam. I thought perhaps you’d reckernize the name. But it’s natural you wouldn’t,” he added, “being as how I’m better known to the public as ‘Slippyfoot.’ Also,” he added simply, “as ‘the Charleston King.’” I began to understand. One knew by hearsay--our personal ambitions in that line having ceased with the fox trot--of the new dancing step which was taking America and even Europe by storm; and I remembered reading that our own city was to be the privileged scene of a coloured Charleston contest, with competitors from all quarters of the country. “So you’ve come to compete in the Charleston contest?” I asked. “Hardly to compete,” he replied gently, looking rather disappointed in me. “Rather to expound, Madam. To show ’em,” he elucidated further, “how the Charleston should be did; its origins, methods, and significations, like I showed ’em,” he added very, very modestly, “in London and in Paris.” I rose to the occasion sufficiently to invite the Charleston King to remain for supper; an invitation he accepted on condition that he be allowed to wait on us at table, which he did, white spats, gardenia, and all. Greatness had not gone to his head; he still remembered his “raisin’.” Incidentally, he dropped and broke my favourite salad bowl. None of us had happened to see the Charleston danced before, or so we thought, until the contest begun. Then we recognized it: the same old clap-and-patter, wriggling and prancing, familiar to any Southern childhood, with some elaborations: a constant St. Vitus-like movement of the feet, odd sidewise skating-motions, a slow dipping of the body up and down and up again, with flapping arms, as of some clip-winged bird trying to fly. “Good gracious!” exclaimed Aunt Lady, beside me. “You don’t tell me _ladies_ and _gentlemen_ are carrying on like this in the ballroom? And what’s the crowd making such a to-do about, anyhow? They can see this sort of thing any day if they look out the back window!” Yet the large auditorium was packed as for a prize fight; white people on the main floor, standing up, mounting their chairs in order to see better; coloured people packing the gallery, in delegations, with appropriate banners; and all shouting together, catcalling, yelling for Slippyfoot Sam. What a descent from his christened name! I was glad for the moment that Mahaly was not present at this apotheosis of her miracle child. But only for a moment.