On the eastern edge of Hooker's Bend, drawn in a rough semicircle around the Big Hill, lies Nigger Town. In all the half-moon there are perhaps not two upright buildings. The grimy shacks lean at crazy angles, some propped with poles, while others hold out against gravitation at a hazard.

Up and down its street flows the slow negro life of the village. Here children of all colors from black to cream fight and play; deep-chested negresses loiter to and fro, some on errands to the white section of the village on the other side of the hill, where they go to scrub or cook or wash or iron. Others go down to the public well with a bucket in each hand and one balanced on the head.

The public well itself lies at the southern end of this miserable street just at a point where the drainage of the Big Hill collects. The rainfall runs down through Nigger Town, under its sties, stables, and outdoor toilets, and the well supplies the negroes with water for cooking, washing, and drinking. Or, rather, what was once a well supplies this water, for it is a well no longer. Its top and curbing caved in long ago, and now there is simply a big hole in the soft, water-soaked clay about fifteen feet wide, with water standing at the bottom.

Here come the unhurried black women, who throw in their buckets, and with a dextrous twitch or two that comes of long practice draw them out full of water. Black mothers shout at their children not to fall into this pit, and now and then, when a pig fails to come up for its evening

slops, a black boy will go to the public well to see if perchance his porker has met misfortune there.

The inhabitants of Nigger Town suffer from divers diseases: they develop strange ailments that no amount of physicking will overcome; young wives grow sickly from no apparent cause. Although only three or four hundred persons live in Nigger Town, two or three negroes are always slowly dying of tuberculosis; winter brings pneumonia; summer, malaria. About once a year the state health officer visits Hooker's Bend and forces the white soda-water dispensers, on the other side of the hill, to sterilize their glasses in the name of the sovęreign State of Tennessee.

The Siner shack was a three-room shanty about midway in the semicircle. Peter Siner stood in the sunlight just outside the entrance watching his old mother clean the bugs out of a tainted ham that she had bought for a pittance from some white housekeeper in the village. It had been too high for white people to eat. Old Caroline patiently tapped the honeycombed meat to scare out the last of the little green householders, and then she washed it in a solution of soda to freshen it up.

The sight of his bulky old mother working at the spoiled ham and of the negro women in the street moving to and from the infected well filled Peter Siner with its terrible pathos. Although he had seen these surroundings all his life, he had a queer impression that he was looking upon them for the first time. During his boyhood he had accepted all this without question as the way the world was made. During his college days a criticism had arisen in his mind, but it came

slowly, and was tempered by that tenderness every one feels for the spot called home. Now as he stood looking at it, he wondered how human beings lived there at all. He wondered if Ida May used water out of Nigger Town well.

He turned to ask old Caroline, but checked himself with a man's instinctive avoidance of mentioning his intimacies to his mother. At that moment, oddly enough, the old negress brought up the topic herself.

"Ida May was 'quirin' 'bout you las' night, Petuh."

A faint tingle filtered through Peter's throat and chest, but he asked casually enough what she said.

"Did n't say; she wrote." Peter looked around, frankly astonished.

"Wrote?"

"Yeh; co'se she wrote."

"What made her write?" a fantasy of Ida May dumb flickered before the mulatto.

"Why, Ida May 's in Nashville." Caroline looked at Peter. "She wrote tuh Cissie, astin' 'bout you. She ast is you as bright in yo' books as you is in yo' culluh?" The old negress gave a pleased abdominal chuckle as she admired her broadshouldered, brown son.

"But I saw Ida May standing on the wharf-boat the day I came home," protested Peter, still bewildered.

"No you ain't. I reckon you seen Cissie. They look kind uh alike when you is fuh off."

"Cissie?" repeated Peter. Then he remembered a smaller sister of Ida May's, a little, squalling, yellow, wet-nosed nuisance that had annoyed his adolescence. So that little spoilsport had grown up into the girl he

A diversion in the shouts of the children up the mean street and a sudden furious barking of dogs drew Peter from the discussion. He looked up, and saw a negro girl of about fourteen coming down the curved street with long, quick steps and an occasional glance over her shoulder.

From across the thoroughfare a small chocolate-colored woman, with her wool done in outstanding spikes, thrust her head out of the door and called:

"Wha''s the matter, Ofeely?" The girl lifted a high voice. "O Miss Nan, it 's that constable goin' tnrough the houses!" The girl veered across the street to the safety of the open door and one of her own

sex.

"Good Lawd!" cried the spiked one in disgust, "evuh time a white pusson gits somethin' misplaced—” She moved to one side to allow the girl to enter, and continued staring up the street, with the whites of her eyes accented against her dark face, after the way of angry negroes.

Around the crescent the dogs were furious. They were Nigger Town

dogs, and the sight of a white man always drove them to a frenzy. Presently in the hullabaloo, Peter heard Dawson Bobbs's voice shouting: "Aunt Mahaly, if you kain't call off this dawg, I 'm shore goin' to kill him."

Then an old woman's scolding broke in and complicated the mêlée. Presently Peter saw the bulky form of Dawson Bobbs come around the curve, moving methodically from shack to shack. He held some legallooking papers in his hands, and Peter knew what the constable was doing. He was serving a blanket search-warrant on the whole black population of Hooker's Bend. At almost every shack a dog ran out to blaspheme at the intruder, but a wave of his pistol sent it yelping under the floor again.

When the constable entered a house, Peter could hear him bumping and rattling among the furnishings, while the black householders stood outside the door and watched him disturb their housekeeping arrangements.

Presently Bobbs came angling across the street toward the Siner shack. As he entered the rickety gate, old Caroline called out:

roaster, not what the negroes meant to put in it.

"I decla'," satirized old Caroline, savagely, "dis heah Niggah Town is a white man's pocket. Evuh time he misplace' somp'n, he feel in his pocket to see ef it ain't thaiuh. Do n' che tu'n ovuh that sody-watter, white man! You know they ain't no tukky roastuh unduh that sody-watter. I 'cla' 'fo' God, if a white man wuz to eat a flapjack, an' it did n't give him de belly-ache, I 'cla' befo' Gawd he'd git out a su'ch-warrant tuh see if some niggah had n't stole' that flapjack as it went 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 him 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 his inspection of the cabin with a practised thoroughness, 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

"Dat makes me mad," she grum

"A turkey roaster," he snapped. "Some o' you niggers stole Miss Lou Arkwright's turkey roaster."

"Tukky roastuh!" cried the old black woman in great disgust. "What you s'pose us niggahs is got to roast in a tukky roastuh?"

The constable answered shortly that his business was to find the

fails to lay dey han' on somp'n, dey comes an' tu'ns ovuh evuh'thing in my house." She paused a moment, closed her eyes in thought, and then mused aloud: "I wonduh who is got Miss A'kwright's roastuh."

The commotion of the constable's passing died in his wake, and Nigger Town resumed its careless existence. Dogs reappeared from under the

shacks and stretched in the sunshine; black children came out of hiding and picked up their play; the frightened Ophelia came out of Nan's shack 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 birdlike virtuosity. The lightness with which Nigger Town accepted the moral side-glance of a blanket searchwarrant 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 redchecked 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 conwhich 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 that lie back of the genre in art. It stirred his emotion in an odd fashion. When old Caroline raised her head, she found her son staring with imper

sonal eyes not at herself, but at the whole room, including her. The old woman was perplexed and a little apprehensive.

"Why, Son," she ejaculated, "did n't you bow yo' haid while yo' mammy ast de grace?"

Peter was a little confused at his remissness. Then he leaned a little forward to explain the sudden glamour which for a moment had transfigured the interior of their kitchen. But even as he started to speak, he realized that what he meant to say would only confuse his mother; therefore he cast about mentally for some other explanation, but found nothing at hand.

"I hope you ain't forgot' yo' 'ligion up at de 'versity, Son."

"Oh, no, no, indeed, Mother; but just at that moment, Mother, just as you bowed your head, you know, it struck me that-that there is something noble in our race." That was the best he could put it to her. "Noble "

"Yes. You know," he went on a little quickly, "sometimes I-I 've thought my father must have been a noble man."

The old negress became very still. She was not looking at her son, or yet precisely away from him.

"Uh-uh noble niggah," she gave her abdominal chuckle,—“why—yeh, I guess yo' fathah was putty noble as -as niggahs go." She sat looking at her son, oddly, with a faint amusement in her gross black face, when a careful voice, a very careful voice, sounded in the outer room, gliding up politely on the syllables:

"Ahnt Caroline, oh, Ahnt Caroline, may I enter?"

The old woman stirred.