“Hallelujah!” was the sole comment of the returned wanderer, and Edith, saying she would “find mamma,” left him blinking at the Moor.  Presently, after she had disappeared, he turned to the colored man who stood waiting, Bibbs’s traveling-bag in his hand.  “What do you think of it?” Bibbs asked, solemnly.

“Gran’!” replied the servitor.  “She mighty hard to dus’.  Dus’ git in all ’em wrinkles.  Yessuh, she mighty hard to dus’.”

“I expect she must be,” said Bibbs, his glance returning reflectively to the black bull beard for a moment.  “Is there a place anywhere I could lie down?”

“Yessuh.  We got one nem spare rooms all fix up fo’ you, suh.  Right up staihs, suh.  Nice room.”

He led the way, and Bibbs followed slowly, stopping at intervals to rest, and noting a heavy increase in the staff of service since the exodus from the “old” house.  Maids and scrubwomen were at work under the patently nominal direction of another Pullman porter, who was profoundly enjoying his own affectation of being harassed with care.

“Ev’ything got look spick an’ span fo’ the big doin’s to-night,” Bibbs’s guide explained, chuckling.  “Yessuh, we got big doin’s to-night!  Big doin’s!”

The room to which he conducted his lagging charge was furnished in every particular like a room in a new hotel; and Bibbs found it pleasant—­though, indeed, any room with a good bed would have seemed pleasant to him after his journey.  He stretched himself flat immediately, and having replied “Not now” to the attendant’s offer to unpack the bag, closed his eyes wearily.

White-jacket, racially sympathetic, lowered the window-shades and made an exit on tiptoe, encountering the other white-jacket—­the harassed overseer—­in the hall without.  Said the emerging one:  “He mighty shaky, Mist’ Jackson.  Drop right down an’ shet his eyes.  Eyelids all black.  Rich folks gotta go same as anybody else.  Anybody ast me if I change ’ith ’at ole boy—­No, suh!  Le’m keep ’is money; I keep my black skin an’ keep out the ground!”

Mr. Jackson expressed the same preference.  “Yessuh, he look tuh me like somebody awready laid out,” he concluded.  And upon the stairway landing, near by, two old women, on all-fours at their work, were likewise pessimistic.

“Hech!” said one, lamenting in a whisper.  “It give me a turn to see him go by—­white as wax an’ bony as a dead fish!  Mrs. Cronin, tell me:  d’it make ye kind o’ sick to look at um?”

“Sick?  No more than the face of a blessed angel already in heaven!”

“Well,” said the other, “I’d a b’y o’ me own come home t’ die once—­” She fell silent at a rustling of skirts in the corridor above them.

It was Mrs. Sheridan hurrying to greet her son.