“Busy, grandpapa?” said Letty, and without waiting for an answer kissed his cheek with a pair of lips made on purpose for that little function,—­fine, but richly turned out, the corners tucked in with a finish of pretty dimples, the rosebud lips of girlhood’s June.

The old gentleman looked at his granddaughter.  Nature swelled up from his heart in a wave that sent a glow to his cheek and a sparkle to his eye.  But it is very hard to be interrupted just as we are winding up a string of propositions with the grand conclusion which is the statement in brief of all that has gone before:  our own starting-point, into which we have been trying to back our reader or listener as one backs a horse into the shafts.

“Video meliora, proboque,—­I see the better, and approve it; deteriora sequor,—­I follow after the worse:  ’tis that natural dislike to what is good, pure, holy, and true, that inrooted selfishness, totally insensible to the claims of”—­

Here the worthy man was interrupted by Miss Letty.

“Do come, if you can, grandpapa,” said the young girl; “here is a poor old black woman wants to see you so much!”

The good minister was as kind-hearted as if he had never groped in the dust and ashes of those cruel old abstractions which have killed out so much of the world’s life and happiness, “With the heart man believeth unto righteousness”; a man’s love is the measure of his fitness for good or bad company here or elsewhere.  Men are tattooed with their special beliefs like so many South-Sea Islanders; but a real human heart, with Divine love in it, beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth’s thousand tribes!

The Doctor sighed, and folded the sermon, and laid the Quarto Cruden on it.  He rose from his desk, and, looking once more at the young girl’s face, forgot his logical conclusions, and said to himself that she was a little angel,—­which was in violent contradiction to the leading doctrine of his sermon on Human Nature.  And so he followed her out of the study into the wide entry of the old-fashioned country-house.

An old black woman sat on the plain oaken settle which humble visitors waiting to see the minister were wont to occupy.  She was old, but how old it would be very hard to guess.  She might be seventy.  She might be ninety.  One could not swear she was not a hundred.  Black women remain at a stationary age (to the eyes of white people, at least) for thirty years.  They do not appear to change during this period any more than so many Trenton trilobites.  Bent up, wrinkled, yellow-eyed, with long upper-lip, projecting jaws, retreating chin, still meek features, long arms, large flat hands with uncolored palms and slightly webbed fingers, it was impossible not to see in this old creature a hint of the gradations by which life climbs up through the lower natures to the highest human developments.  We cannot tell such old women’s ages because we do not understand the physiognomy of a race so unlike our own.  No doubt they see a great deal in each other’s faces that we cannot,—­changes of color and expression as real as our own, blushes and sudden betrayals of feeling,—­just as these two canaries know what their single notes and short sentences and full song with this or that variation mean, though it is a mystery to us unplumed mortals.