ue to Dr. Burns's friendship that
Miller had won a scholarship which had enabled him, without drawing too
heavily upon his father's resources, to spend in Europe, studying in the
hospitals of Paris and Vienna, the two most delightful years of his
life. The same influence had strengthened his natural inclination toward
operative surgery, in which Dr. Burns was a distinguished specialist of
national reputation.

Miller's father, Adam Miller, had been a thrifty colored man, the son of
a slave, who, in the olden time, had bought himself with money which he
had earned and saved, over and above what he had paid his master for his
time. Adam Miller had inherited his father's thrift, as well as his
trade, which was that of a stevedore, or contractor for the loading and
unloading of vessels at the port of Wellington. In the flush turpentine
days following a few years after the civil war, he had made money. His
savings, shrewdly invested, had by constant accessions become a
competence. He had brought up his eldest son to the trade; the other he
had given a professional education, in the proud hope that his children
or his grandchildren might be gentlemen in the town where their
ancestors had once been slaves.

Upon his father's death, shortly after Dr. Miller's return from Europe,
and a year or two before the date at which this story opens, he had
promptly spent part of his inheritance in founding a hospital, to which
was to be added a training school for nurses, and in time perhaps a
medical college and a school of pharmacy. He had been strongly tempted
to leave the South, and seek a home for his family and a career for
himself in the freer North, where race antagonism was less keen, or at
least less oppressive, or in Europe, where he had never found his color
work to his disadvantage. But his people had needed him, and he had
wished to help them, and had sought by means of this institution to
contribute to their uplifting. As he now informed Dr. Burns, he was
returning from New York, where he had been in order to purchase
equipment for his new hospital, which would soon be ready for the
reception of patients.

"How much I can accomplish I do not know," said Miller, "but I'll do
what I can. There are eight or nine million of us, and it will take a
great deal of learning of all kinds to leaven that lump."

"It is a great problem, Miller, the future of your race," returned the
other, "a tremendously interesting problem. It is