s reminiscence. Another loafer
contributed an anecdote of how he had tied ropes to a dead negro so as
to make the corpse sit up in bed and frighten the mourners.

All their tales were of the vintage of the years immediately succeeding
the Civil War,--pioneer humor, such as convulsed the readers of Peck's
Bad Boy, Mr. Bowser, Sut Lovingood. The favorite dramatic properties of
such writers were the hornets' nest, the falling ladder, the banana
peel. They cultivated the humor of contusions, the wit of impact. This
style still holds the stage of Hooker's Bend.

In telling these tales the white villagers meant no special disrespect
to the negro funeral. It simply reminded them of humorous things; so
they told their jokes, like the naive children of the soil that they
were.

At last the poor procession passed beyond the white church, around a
bend in the road, and so vanished. Presently the bell in Niggertown
ceased tolling.

* * * * *

Peter always remembered his mother's funeral in fragments of intolerable
pathos,--the lifting of old Parson Ranson's hands toward heaven, the
songs of the black folk, the murmur of the first shovelful of dirt as it
was lowered to the coffin, and the final raw mound of earth littered
with a few dying flowers. With that his mother--who had been so near to,
and so disappointed in, her son--was blotted from his life. The other
events of the funeral flowed by in a sort of dream: he moved about; the
negroes were speaking to him in the queer overtones one uses to the
bereaved; he was being driven back to Niggertown; he reentered the Siner
cabin. One or two of his friends stayed in the room with him for a while
and said vague things, but there was nothing to say.

Later in the afternoon Cissie Dildine and her mother brought his dinner
to him. Vannie Dildine, a thin yellow woman, uttered a few disjointed
words about Sister Ca'line being a good woman, and stopped amid
sentence. There was nothing to say. Death had cut a wound across Peter
Siner's life. Not for days, nor weeks, nor months, would his existence
knit solidly back together. The poison of his ingratitude to his
faithful old black mother would for a long, long day prevent the
healing.

CHAPTER VII

During a period following his mother's death Peter Siner's life drifted
emptily and without purpose. He had the feeling of one convalescing in a
hospital. His