The old woman mumbled through toothless gums. She was wearing a bandanna handkerchief wrapped tightly about her head, and beneath it a few grey-green wisps of hair straggled down to meet the dried grass of her eyebrows. Her face was so old that it looked as if the flesh had been polished away, and her features shone like black lacquer where the light struck them. "Naw'm, I ain't heerd nuttin'," she replied, "but I'se done been lookin' fur you all de evelin'. Dar's a lil' bird done tole me you wuz comin'," she muttered mysteriously. "I wasn't sure of it myself till just before I started." "I knowed, honey, I knowed," rejoined Aunt Mehitable, leaning against the smoke-blackened pine by her doorstep, while she fixed her bleared, witchlike gaze on the girl. There was the dignity in her demeanour that is inherent in all simple, profound, and elemental forces. The pipe she had taken out of the pocket of her apron was in her mouth, but the stem was cold and she mumbled over it without smoking. With her psychic powers, which were a natural endowment, she combined a dramatic gift that was not uncommon among the earlier generations of negroes. In another century Aunt Mehitable would have been either a mystic philosopher or a religious healer. "Can you really see things, Aunt Mehitable?" Dorinda inquired, impressed but not convinced. Aunt Mehitable grunted over her smokeless pipe. "Mebbe I kin en mebbe I cyan't." "They say you can tell about the future?" "Hi!" the old negress exclaimed, and continued with assumed indifference. "Dey sez I kin do a heap mo'n I kin do. But I ain' steddyin' about'n dat, honey. I knows w'at I knows. I kin teck moles en warts en liver spots off'n you twell you is jes' ez smooth ez de pa'm er my han', en ern ennybody's done put a conjure ball ovah yo' do' er th'owed a ring on de grass fur you to walk in, I kin tell you whar you mus' go ter jump ovah runnin' water. Ern you is in enny trubble, honey, hit's mos' likely I kin teck hit erway. Is you stuck full er pins an' needles in yo' legs an' arms, jes' lak somebody done th'owed a spell on you?" "No, it isn't that," answered Dorinda. "I came because I thought you might have heard something from Jemima. I'd better be starting back now. I want to get home, if I can, before the storm breaks----" She had risen to her feet, and was turning to look at the clouds in the west, when the broomsedge plunged forward, like a raging sea, and engulfed her. She felt the pain and dizziness of the blow; she heard the thunder of the waves as they crashed together; and she saw the billows, capped with spray-ike plumes, submerging the cabin, the fields, the woods, and the silver crescent of the horizon.