"My dearest Papa,--I hope you are quite well. I am visiting mamma at present at Strathpeffer. She is much better now than when she was travelling. Mamma's sisters give their love to you, and mamma, and Mr. and Mrs. F. also. They all ask you to pray for them, and they will pray also. There are a great many at water here for sick people to drink out of. The smell of the water is not at all nice. I sometimes drink it. Give my dearest love to Narsion Skishadre, and tell her that I will write to her.--Dearest papa," etc.
It was a simple thought, which required no reach of mind whatever to grasp,--and yet an hour spent with little Buchubai made it tell upon me more powerfully than ever before,--that there is in reality but one human nature on the face of the earth. Had I simply read of Buchubai Hormazdji corresponding with her father Hormazdji Pestonji, and sending her dear love to her old companion Narsion Skishadre, the names so specifically different from those which we ourselves employ in designating our country folk, would probably have led me, through a false association, to regard the parties to which they attach as scarcely less specifically different from our country folk themselves. I suspect we are misled by associations of this kind when we descant on the peculiarities of race as interposing insurmountable barriers to the progress of improvement, physical or mental. We overlook, amid the diversities of form, color, and language, the specific identity of the human family. The Celt, for instance, wants, it is said, those powers of sustained application which so remarkably distinguish the Saxon; and so we agree on the expediency of getting rid of our poor Highlanders by expatriation as soon as possible, and of converting their country into sheep-walks and hunting-parks. It would be surely well to have philosophy enough to remember what, simply through the exercise of a wise faith, the Christian missionary never forgets, that the peculiarities of race are not specific and ineradicable, but mere induced habits and idiosyncracies engrafted on the stock of a common nature by accident of circumstance or development; and that, as they have been wrought into the original tissue through the protracted operation of one set of causes, the operation of another and different set, wisely and perseveringly directed, could scarce fail to unravel and work them out again. They form no part of the inherent design of man's nature, but have merely stuck to it in its transmissive passage downwards and require to be brushed off. There was a time, some four thousand years ago, when Celt and Saxon were represented by but one man and his wife, with their children and their children's wives; and some sixteen or seventeen centuries earlier all the varieties of the species,--Caucasian and Negro, Mongolian and Malay,--lay close packed up in the world's single family. In short, Buchubai's amusing prattle proved to me this evening no bad commentary on St. Paul's sublime enunciation to the Athenians, that God has "made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth." I was amused to find that the little girl, who listened intently as I described to the young ladies all I had seen and knew of the Auldgrande, had never before heard of a ghost, and could form no conception of one now. The ladies explained, described, defined; carefully guarding all they said, however, by stern disclaimers against the ghost theory altogether, but apparently to little purpose. At length Buchubai exclaimed, that she now knew what they meant, and that she herself had seen a great many ghosts in India. On explanation, however, her ghosts, though quite frightful enough, turned out to be not at all spiritual: they were things of common occurrence in the land she had come from,--exposed bodies of the dead.