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

“Why, son!” she ejaculated, “didn’ 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 of his behavior, 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, 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.