Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

OUR AFRICAN APPRENTICESHIP 55
lurking leopard or hyena forces him into his few feet of
stuflfy hut during all the waning phases, so now or never
is the chance when it looms large like a new half-crown.
Right through the night that dance froths and bubbles
along, the whole negro from head to heels mad with the
moonlight—the Devil's St. Vitus dance !
So ingrained is this jigging that even a sedate negro
convert to Christianity has still got it in the very bones,
** dancing before the Lord" she would call it. Here was
a thing to be seen and never forgotten, the Devil's jig
consecrated to the Lord. The soul of delicacy and dis-
cretion, I spotted an elect lady dancing out her Christian
joy as a solemn duty, not a smile in her antics, no thought
of the burlesque, yet to me, a new-comer, what a gazing-
stock ! The
amazing, maddening mix-up of the prayer in
the heart and the prance in the feet ! Asked her what it
meant at all at all, and she quaintly replied, " Oh !
it is
only praise getting out at the toes" Then she actioned
this new idea to me—this praise-getting-out-at-the-toes
idea, I mean. Making a diagram of her own body, she
first of all put her hand over her heart as indicating
her central source of joy— " the generator," she called it.
Granting then a heart pulsating with joy ;
with her crooked
old finger she now traces on her body two opposite thrills
of joy, one shooting up and through her mouth in vocal
praise, the other darting down to her feet— praise getting
out at the toes in dancing ! A confession this with a
moral, surely, for how much of God's joy is allowed to
evaporate by the mouth in mere talk when it should