Page:Rowland--In the shadow.djvu/112

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IN THE SHADOW



Africa. According to that, some negro in the States who has only seen Americans might set up to be an authority upon all of the English because they are Anglo-Saxons."

"I think," said Leyden, "that there is really very little difference between an African negro and one from Carolina; the chief cause of their perplexity in the United States seems to me to be because they attempt to class the yellow with the black; a mulatto to my mind is less a negro than a white. There are really not enough pure negroes left in the United States to construct a racial problem on. I think that in time the mulatto will prove the antitoxin of the black." He glanced at Virginia and abruptly changed the topic.

It was the day of the fête to which they had been asked by Dessalines. A bright sun temporarily obscured by huge cumulus clouds, alternated areas of high light and shadow, the chiaroscuro of the Italians. The temperature was high, a trifle too high for the comfort of all but Leyden.

Dessalines' cottage was on the bank of the river, the stream at this point expanding into a diminutive lake. Just below, it was crossed by the bridge of the private road leading to Chelton House, then unoccupied. The cottage was a part of the large estate; it had been built, by the last proprietor, as a summer studio for his brother-in-law, a landscape painter. As it was intended only for summer residence it had been patterned after a Japanese villa, and oddly enough the peculiar formation of the site had been found to permit of certain semitropical trees and shrubs which would grow nowhere else in the locality, if, indeed, anywhere in England. It is a curious

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