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 of 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 from the Niggertown 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 wuz ‘quirin’ ‘bout you las’ night, Peter.”

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

“Didn’ say; she wrote.”

Peter looked around, frankly astonished.

“Wrote?”

“Yeah; co’se she wrote.”

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

[Illustration:  Up and down its street flows the slow negro life of the village]

“Why, Ida May’s in Nashville.”  Caroline looked at Peter.  “She wrote to Cissie, astin’ ‘bout you.  She ast is you as bright in yo’ books as you is in yo’ color.”  The old negress gave a pleased abdominal chuckle as she admired her broad-shouldered 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.  Dey looks kind o’ like when you is fur 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 spoil-sport had grown up into the girl he had mistaken for Ida May.  This fact increased his sense of strangeness—­that sense of great change that had fallen on the village in his absence which formed the groundwork of all his renewed associations.

Peter’s prolonged silence aroused certain suspicions in the old negress.  She glanced at her son out of the tail of her eyes.

“Cissie Dildine is Tump Pack’s gal,” she stated defensively, with the jealousy all mothers feel toward all sons.

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 at the door and called: