became impossible. He lost his place; he hardly knew what he was
writing.

He flung aside the whole work, got to his feet with the imperative need
of an athlete for the open. He started out of the room, but as an
afterthought scribbled a nervous line, telling the Captain he might not
be back for dinner. Then he found his hat and coat and walked briskly
around the piazza to the front gate.

The trees and shrubs were dripping, but the fog had almost cleared away,
leaving only a haze in the air. A pale, level line of it cut across the
scarp of the Big Hill. The sun shone with a peculiar soft light through
the vapors.

As Peter passed out at the gate, the fancy came to him that he might
very well be starting on his mission. It came with a sort of surprise.
He wondered how other men had set about reforms. With unpremeditation?
He wondered to whom Jesus of Nazareth preached his first sermon. The
thought of that young Galilean, sensitive, compassionate, inexperienced,
speaking to his first hearer, filled Peter with a strange trembling
tenderness. He looked about the familiar street of Hooker's Bend, the
old trees over the pavement, the shabby village houses, and it all held
a strangeness when thus juxtaposed to the thought of Nazareth nineteen
hundred years before.

The mulatto started down the street with his footsteps quickened by a
sense of spiritual adventure.

CHAPTER XVI

On the corner, against the blank south wall of Hobbett's store, Peter
Siner saw the usual crowd of negroes warming themselves in the soft
sunshine. They were slapping one another, scuffling, making feints with
knives or stones, all to an accompaniment of bragging, profanity, and
loud laughter. Their behavior was precisely that of adolescent white
boys of fifteen or sixteen years of age.

Jim Pink Staggs was furnishing much amusement with an impromptu sleight-
of-hand exhibition. The black audience clustered around Jim Pink in his
pinstripe trousers and blue-serge coat. They exhibited not the least
curiosity as to the mechanics of the tricks, but asked for more and
still more, with the naive delight of children in the mysterious.

Peter Siner walked down the street with his Messianic impulse strong
upon him. He was in that stage of feeling toward his people where a
man's emotions take the color of religion. Now, as he approached the
crowd of negroes, he wondered what he could say, how he could transfer
to t