until everybody had arrived. The
Kentucky blacks came last. Then there was a waiting, a restraint, the
people looked at one another. Finally their uneasiness and unspoken
question were answered by an edict from the mouth of a small upright
Frenchman, who mounted a stump and declaimed with a great flourish of
graceful pomposity:

"'Tis the wish of Mistaire and Meez Steering that none go to the mill
until that the bar-r-becue shall be end." He was generously applauded
and his fine shoulders stiffened responsively. This was the sort of
thing that Francois Placide DeLassus Bernique liked.

The people contented themselves within the clearing the little time
that remained of the morning. At one side of the clearing, fenced off by
ropes, was a long trench, across which stretched poles of tough green
hickory. On top of these poles lay great quarters of beeves, whole hogs,
slit through the belly and spread wide till the dressed flesh wrinkled
into the back-bone in thick layers, sheep, tongues, venison, an army's
rations. Down in the trench glowed the red-hot coals of a vast Vulcan
fire, set going the night before and fed and beaten all night into its
present perfect equability. Up and down the sides of the trench walked
men in great aprons, long-handled brushes, like white-wash brushes, in
their hands. These brushes they dipped into buckets of salt and pepper,
strung along the trench at regular intervals, and smeared the sizzling
meat, a sort of Titanic seasoning process.

Rough pine boards, supported on tree stumps, formed long lines of tables
on which loaves of bread were piled two feet high. Beside the bread
were great buckets of pickles, preserves, jams, whole churns of butter,
cheeses, cakes, pies, hundreds and hundreds of them, as though the whole
world had become one enormous maw with an enormous clamour for food.
The rich aroma of the sizzling meat and the slow sweet scorch of the
green hickory poles drifted up into the trees and hung there, a visible
odour, tantalising, insistent. The men who had got into their wives'
aprons and had begun to cut sandwiches at the long tables were invited
to hurry up. The men who were varnishing the meat with salt and pepper
were told that they were too slow. The boys who had begun cracking
ice were applauded. The girls who had begun to squeeze lemons
were offered help. The women who had begun to set out knives
and forks and plates were interrupted and set back by hoots of
encouragem