race; unless, indeed, it be shared by the dark man, when he sees on his wife's arm a child that is not of his colour); his mother had often a black husband or lover of her own; and the Half-caste crept about the backyard of its father's house, and in and out of the slave cells, and as it grew, it learnt that it belonged neither wholly to the black group who ate their food in the kitchen doorway, nor to the white, in the great dining-hall. When full consciousness came to him, half he despised the black flesh about him, with the instinct of a white man's son; and half, he hated, with the passion of the black woman's child, the folk in the large house. He belonged to neither--the very breast he had sucked was not of the same colour as himself. But it was not even the fact that he was born into a society in which there was no appointed station for him, and no class with which he was wholly at one, that constituted the forefront of his wrong and suffering. The true key to the Half-caste's position lay in the past, as it still lies to-day, in the fact, that he is _not at harmony within himself_. He alone of all living creatures despises his own blood. "I could bite my own arm," a coloured girl once said in our presence, "when I see how black it is. My father was a white man!" The Half-caste alone of all created things is at war within his own individuality. The white man loves the white man incarnate in him, and the black man loves the black. We are each of us our own ideal. The black may envy the white his power or his knowledge, but he admires himself most. "You say the devil is black! But I picture him a white man with blue eyes and yellow hair," said to us a Bantu once. "I have a great sorrow," said an intelligent native preacher. "I know that the Lord Jesus Christ was a white man, yet I could not pray to Him and love Him as I do if I did not picture Him as black and with wool like myself." Of that divine contentment with his own inalienable personality which lies at the root of all the heroic and half the social virtues, the Half-caste can know little. If it were possible for him with red-hot pincers to draw out every ounce of flesh that was black man's, and leave only the white, in most cases he would do it. That race which would accept him he despises; and the race he aspires to refuses him. So the first Half-caste arose: a creature without a family, without a nationality, without a stable kind, with which it might feel itself allied, and whose ideals it might accept.