Rosina hesitated, and cudgelled her poor brains eagerly a few minutes longer; then another happy flash of recollection came across her suddenly like an inspiration, and she cried out in a joyous tone: ‘Yes, yes; I got him now, I got him now, Isaac! Him mudder family deir name is Budleigh, an’ dem lib at place dem call de Wilderness. Mistah ’Zekiel tell me all about dem. Him say dat dis le-ady, what him name Missy Budleigh, marry de buckra gentleman fader, what him name Sir-waltah Noel.’ It was an enormous and unprecedented fetch of memory for a pure-blooded black woman, and Rosina Fleming was justly proud of it. She stood there grinning and smiling from ear to ear, so that even the skull upon the wall opposite was simply nowhere in the competition. Delgado turned breathlessly to Isaac Pourtalès. ‘You know dis fam’ly?’ he asked with eager anticipation. ‘You ebber hear ob dem? You larn at all whedder dem is buckra or only brown people?’ Louis Delgado laughed hoarsely. Brown man as he was himself, he chuckled and hugged himself with sardonic delight over the anticipated humiliation of a fellow brown man who thought himself a genuine buckra. ‘Know dem, sah!’ Isaac cried in a perfect ecstasy of malicious humour—‘know de Budleighs ob de Wilderness! I tink for true I know dem! _Hé!_ Mistah Delgado, me fren’, I tellin’ you de trut, sah; me own mudder an’ Mrs Budleigh ob de Wilderness is first-cousin, first-cousin to one anudder.’ It was perfectly true. Strange as such a relationship sounds to English ears, in the West Indies cases of the sort are as common as earthquakes. In many a cultivated light-brown family, where the young ladies of the household, pretty and well educated, expect and hope to marry an English officer of good connections, the visitor knows that, in some small room or other of the back premises, there still lingers on feebly an old black hag, wrinkled and toothless, full of strange oaths and incomprehensible African jargons, who is nevertheless the grandmother of the proud and handsome girls, busy over Mendelssohn’s sonatas and the _Saturday Review_, in the front drawing-room. Into such a family it was that Sir Walter Noel, head of the great Lincolnshire house, had actually married. The Budleighs of the Wilderness had migrated to England before the abolition of slavery, when the future Lady Noel was still a baby; and getting easily into good society in London, had only been known as West Indian proprietors in those old days when to be a West Indian proprietor was still equivalent to wealth and prosperity, not, as now, to poverty and bankruptcy.