lack 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.

She was one of those fat, pink people who fade and contract with age
like drying fruit; and her outside was a true portrait of her. Her
husband and her daughter had long ago absorbed her. What intelligence
she had was given almost wholly to comprehending and serving those
two, and except in the pres