The adopted protégé was, in reality, a strapping clumsy Negress, as ugly as sin, and with no other merit than that of being of the same colour as the crow. She was artful, sullen, gluttonous, and above all so intolerably indolent, that if she had been literally “carved in ebony,” as old Fuller says, she could scarcely have been of less service to her protectress. Her notion of Free Labour seemed to translate it into laziness, and taking liberties; and, as she seriously added to the work of her fellow-servants, without at all contributing to their comfort, they soon looked upon her as a complete nuisance. The housemaid dubbed her “a Divil,”--the cook roundly compared her to “a mischivus beast, as runs out on a herd o’ black cattle;”--and both concurred in the policy of laying all household sins upon the sooty shoulders--just as slatterns select a colour that hides the dirt. It is certain that shortly after the instalment of the negress in the family a moral disease broke out with considerable violence, and justly or not, the odium was attributed to the new comer. Its name was theft. First, there was a shilling short in some loose change--next, a missing half-crown from the mantelpiece--then there was a stir with a tea-spoon--anon, a piece of work about a thimble. Things went, nobody knew how--the “Divil” of course excepted. The Cook _could_, the Housemaid _would_, and Dinah _should_, and _ought_ to take an oath, declaratory of innocence, before the mayor; but as Dinah did not volunteer an affidavit like the others, there was no doubt of her guilt in the kitchen. Miss Morbid, however, came to a very different conclusion. She thought that whites who could eat sugar, were capable of any atrocity, and had not forgotten the stand which had been made by the “pale faces,” in favour of the obnoxious article. The cook especially incurred suspicion; for she had been notorious aforetime for a lavish hand in sweetening, and was accordingly quite equal to the double turpitude of stealing and bearing false witness. In fact the mistress had arrived at the determination of giving both her white hussies their month’s warning, when unexpectedly the thief was taken, as the lawyers say, “in the manner,” and with the goods upon the person. In a word the ungrateful black was detected, in the very act of levying what might be called her “Black Mail.”