lapjack goin' down his th'oat."

"Mr. Bobbs has to do his work, Mother," put in Peter. "I don't suppose
he enjoys it any more than we do."

"Den let 'im git out'n dis business an' git in anudder," scolded the old
woman. "Dis sho is a mighty po' business."

The ponderous Mr. Bobbs finished with a practised thoroughness his
inspection of the cabin, and then the inquisition proceeded down the
street, around the crescent, and so out of sight and eventually out of
hearing.

Old Caroline snapped her chair back beside her greasy table and sat down
abruptly to her spoiled ham again.

"Dat make me mad," she grumbled. "Ever' time a white pusson fail to lay
dey han' on somp'n, dey comes an' turns over ever'thing in my house."
She paused a moment, closed her eyes in thought, and then mused aloud:
"I wonder who is got Miss Arkwright's roaster."

The commotion of the constable's passing died in his wake, and
Niggertown resumed its careless existence. Dogs reappeared from under
the cabins and stretched in the sunshine; black children came out of
hiding and picked up their play; the frightened Ophelia came out of
Nan's cabin across the street and went her way; a lanky negro youth in
blue coat and pin-striped trousers appeared, coming down the squalid
thoroughfare whistling the "Memphis Blues" with bird-like virtuosity.
The lightness with which Niggertown accepted the moral side glance of a
blanket search-warrant depressed Siner.

Caroline called her son to dinner, as the twelve-o'clock meal is called
in Hooker's Bend, and so ended his meditation. The Harvard man went back
into the kitchen and sat down at a rickety table covered with a red-
checked oil-cloth. On it were spread the spoiled ham, a dish of poke
salad, a corn pone, and a pot of weak coffee. A quaint old bowl held
some brown sugar. The fat old negress made a slight, habitual settling
movement in her chair that marked the end of her cooking and the
beginning of her meal. Then she bent her grizzled, woolly head and
mumbled off one of those queer old-fashioned graces which consist of a
swift string of syllables without pauses between either words or
sentences.

Peter sat watching his mother with a musing gaze. The kitchen was
illuminated by a single small square window set high up from the floor.
Now the disposition of its single ray of light over the dishes and the
bowed head of the massive negress gave Peter one of those sharp, tender
apprehensions of formal harmony