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Updated: June 15, 2025
Having heard this excellent representation of the ancient minstrel, we were shortly given a touch of the modern usurper of the name. A gentleman was present who in the many turns of Fortune's wheel had once found himself a follower of the burnt-cork persuasion. He gave us a negro melody with a lively accompaniment on the guitar. A melancholy Spanish song followed.
The two burnt-cork comedians finished their turn and their three encores, and the curtain behind them went up on a full set of an empty stage. A rough-coated Irish terrier entered at a sedate walk, sedately walked forward to the centre, nearly to the footlights, and faced the leader of the orchestra. As the programme had stated, he had the stage to himself.
Any one of us could have gone on the negro minstrel stage, without changing a hair, and put to blush the most elaborate make-up of the grotesque burnt-cork artists. No wood was issued to us.
Whether they were playing the ring and string game or the ruble game or talking as now, Nicholas did not leave Sonya's side, and gazed at her with quite new eyes. It seemed to him that it was only today, thanks to that burnt-cork mustache, that he had fully learned to know her. And really, that evening, Sonya was brighter, more animated, and prettier than Nicholas had ever seen her before.
It used to upset my gravity entirely to see a crowd of grave and dignified Captains, Majors and Colonels going through this nonsensical drollery with all the abandon of professional burnt-cork artists. As we were nearing the entrance to Chesapeake Bay we passed a great monitor, who was exercising her crew at the guns.
On one low balcony, a copper-colored man, with a huge feather cap and the traditional dress of the American savage, was beating two drums; a burnt-cork black man stood beside him; while on the steps was a woman, in hat and shawl, making an earnest speech to the crowd.
There were only two kinds of show known by that name in the Boy's Town: a nigger show, or a performance of burnt-cork minstrels; and an animal show, or a strolling menagerie; and the boys always meant a menagerie when they spoke of a show, unless they said just what sort of show.
And now the souls of Leonore and the monk haunt the scene of their midnight crime. You will find the story in Grainberg's book, worked up with a kind of red-morocco and burnt-cork sublimity, and great melo-dramatic clanking of chains, and hooting of owls, and other fallow deer!" "After breakfast," said Flemming, "we will go up to the castle.
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