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 Niggertown, 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 colored women, who throw in their buckets, and
with a dexterity 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 Niggertown 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 Niggertown, 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 sovereign State of Tennessee.

The Siner home 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 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