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:

"Whut's de matter, Ofeely?"

The girl lifted a high voice: