Dr Whitaker was not in the humour just that moment to indulge in pleasantries with Miss Seraphina M‘Culloch, a brown young lady of buxom figure and remarkably free-and-easy conversation; so he sighed impatiently as he answered with a hasty wave of his hand: ‘No, Euphemia; I can’t come in and see your friend just this minute. I must go into my own room to make up some medicines—some very urgent medicines—wanted immediately—for some of my poor sick patients.’ Heaven help his soul for that transparent little prevarication, for all the medicine had been sent out in charge of a ragged negro boy more than two hours ago; and it was Dr Whitaker’s own heart that was sick and ill at ease, beyond the power of any medicine ever to remedy. Miss Euphemia pouted her already sufficiently protruding lips. ‘Always dem stoopid niggers,’ she answered contemptuously. ‘How on eart a man like you, Wilberforce, dat has always been brought up respectable an’ proper, in a decent fam’ly, can bear to go an’ trow away his time in attendin’ to a parcel of low nigger people, is more dan I can ever understan’.—Can you, Seraphina?’ Miss Seraphina responded immediately, that, in her opinion, niggers was a disgraceful set of dat low, disreputable people, dat how a man like Dr Wilberforce Whitaker could so much demean hisself as ever to touch dem, really surpassed her limited comprehension. Dr Whitaker strode angrily away into his own room, muttering to himself as he went, that one couldn’t blame the white people for looking down upon the browns, when the browns themselves, in their foolish travesty of white prejudice, looked down so much upon their brother blacks beneath them. In a minute more, he reappeared with a face of puzzled bewilderment at the drawing-room door, and cried to his sister angrily: ‘Euphemia, Euphemia! what have you done, I’d like to know, with all those specimens I brought in this morning, and left, when I went out, upon my study table?’ ‘Wilberforce,’ Miss Euphemia answered with stately dignity, rising to confront him, ‘I tink I can’t stand dis mess an’ rubbish dat you make about de house a minute longer.—Pheenie! I tell you how dat man treat de fam’ly. Every day, he goes out into de woods an’ he cuts bush—common bush, all sort of weed an’ trash an’ rubbish; an’ he brings dem home, an’ puts dem in de study, so dat de house don’t never tidy, however much you try for to tidy him. Well, dis mornin’ I say to myself: “I don’t goin’ to stand dis lumber-room in a respectable fam’ly any longer.” So I take de bush dat Wilberforce bring in; I carry him out to de kitchen altogedder; I open de stove, an’ I trow him in all in a lump into de very middle of de kitchen fire. Ha, ha, ha! him burn an’ crackle all de same as if he was chock-full of blazin’ gunpowder!’