“And what is the translation of that?” he demanded excitedly.

“Tell me,” I feebly answered.

He shouted with overweening triumph:  “The translation of that is South Carolina nigger.  Notice well this so egcellent specimen.  Prognathous, megadont, platyrrhine.”

“Ha!  Platyrrhine!” I saluted the one word I recognized as I drowned.

“You have said it yourself!” was his extraordinary answer;—­for what had I said?  Almost as if he were going to break into a dance for joy, he took the Caucasian skull and the other two, and set the three together by themselves, away from the rest of the collection.  The picture which they thus made spoke more than all the measurements and statistics which he now chattered out upon me, reading from his book as I contemplated the skulls.  There was a similarity of shape, a kinship there between the three, which stared you in the face; but in the contours of vaulted skull, the projecting jaws, and the great molar teeth—­what was to be seen?  Why, in every respect that the African departed from the Caucasian, he departed in the direction of the ape!  Here was zoology mutely but eloquently telling us why there had blossomed no Confucius, no Moses, no Napoleon, upon that black stem; why no Iliad, no Parthenon, no Sistine Madonna, had ever risen from that tropic mud.

The collector touched my sleeve.  “Have you now learned someding about skulls, my friend?  Will you invite those Boston philanthropists to stay home?  They will get better results in civilization by giving votes to monkeys than teaching Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to riggers.”

Retaliation rose in me.  “Haven’t you learned to call them negroes?” I remarked.  But this was lost upon the Teuton.  I was tempted to tell him that I was no philanthropist, and no Bostonian, and that he need not shout so loud, but my more dignified instincts restrained me.  I withdrew my sleeve from his touch (it was this act of his, I think, that had most to do with my displeasure), and merely bidding him observe that the enormous price of the kettle-supporter had been reduced for me by his exhibition to a bagatelle, I left the shop of the screaming anatomist—­or Afropath, or whatever it may seem most fitting that he should be called.

I bore the kettle-supporter with me, tied up objectionably in newspaper, and knotted with ungainly string; and it was this bundle which prevented my joining the girl behind the counter, and ending by a walk with a young lady the afternoon that had begun by a walk with two old ones.  I should have liked to make my confession to her.  She was evidently out for the sake of taking the air, and had with her no companion save the big curly white dog; confession would have been very agreeable; but I looked again at my ugly newspaper bundle, and turned in a direction that she was not herself pursuing.