CHAPTER VII
MIND AND MATTER
ACH! The inane popular delusion!" exclaimed Leyden as he slapped his riding boot with his crop. While waiting for Virginia, with whom he was to ride, he was talking with Giles, who was that morning to inspect some horses which Manning planned to send to Carolina. "Take a savage," continued Leyden, "of the imperfect civilization of a century, cover the nakedness of his body with a pair of well-cut breeches and the nakedness of his brain with a vocabulary and behold … a brother! Observe this negro, Dessalines, as he rode in here yesterday upon his man-eating stallion; such a spectacle! One does not need to look deep there to find the pagan … and speaking of the stallion, I understand that the brute nearly killed a groom the first time he was brought here. It is like a black to endanger the lives of his friends for the sake of indulging his vanity."
Giles looked troubled. "It seems to me that you are unfair to Dessalines, Dr. Leyden," he said, flushing like a schoolboy. "Dessalines has shown that he possesses a good mind."
"In what way?" asked Leyden quietly. "I think that I can predicate. In classics, in languages, in rhetoric, in debate—never by any chance in mathematics or anything requiring a complex cerebration. Am I not right? Yes?"
78
