- end_line
- 3982
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T07:57:55.409Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 3930
- text
- employment, with a marvelous, noiseless, gliding briskness, not
ungraceful in its way, singularly pleasing to behold, and still more so
to be the manipulated subject of. And above all is the great gift of
good-humor. Not the mere grin or laugh is here meant. Those were
unsuitable. But a certain easy cheerfulness, harmonious in every glance
and gesture; as though God had set the whole negro to some pleasant
tune.
When to this is added the docility arising from the unaspiring
contentment of a limited mind and that susceptibility of blind
attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors, one readily
perceives why those hypochondriacs, Johnson and Byron—it may be,
something like the hypochondriac Benito Cereno—took to their hearts,
almost to the exclusion of the entire white race, their serving men,
the negroes, Barber and Fletcher. But if there be that in the negro
which exempts him from the inflicted sourness of the morbid or cynical
mind, how, in his most prepossessing aspects, must he appear to a
benevolent one? When at ease with respect to exterior things, Captain
Delano’s nature was not only benign, but familiarly and humorously so.
At home, he had often taken rare satisfaction in sitting in his door,
watching some free man of color at his work or play. If on a voyage he
chanced to have a black sailor, invariably he was on chatty and
half-gamesome terms with him. In fact, like most men of a good, blithe
heart, Captain Delano took to negroes, not philanthropically, but
genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs.
Hitherto, the circumstances in which he found the San Dominick had
repressed the tendency. But in the cuddy, relieved from his former
uneasiness, and, for various reasons, more sociably inclined than at
any previous period of the day, and seeing the colored servant, napkin
on arm, so debonair about his master, in a business so familiar as that
of shaving, too, all his old weakness for negroes returned.
Among other things, he was amused with an odd instance of the African
love of bright colors and fine shows, in the black’s informally taking
from the flag-locker a great piece of bunting of all hues, and lavishly
tucking it under his master’s chin for an apron.
The mode of shaving among the Spaniards is a little different from what
it is with other nations. They have a basin, specifically called a
barber’s basin, which on one side is scooped out, so as accurately to
receive the chin, against which it is closely held in lathering; which
is done, not with a brush, but with soap dipped in the water of the
basin and rubbed on the face.
In the present instance salt-water was used for lack of better; and the
parts lathered were only the upper lip, and low down under the throat,
all the rest being cultivated beard.
The preliminaries being somewhat novel to Captain Delano, he sat
curiously eying them, so that no conversation took place, nor, for the
present, did Don Benito appear disposed to renew any.
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