"Tukky roaster!" cried the old black woman, in great disgust. "Whut you s'pose us niggers is got to roast in a tukky roaster?" The constable answered shortly that his business was to find the roaster, not what the negroes meant to put in it. "I decla'," satirized old Caroline, savagely, "dish-heah Niggertown is a white man's pocket. Ever' time he misplace somp'n, he feel in his pocket to see ef it ain't thaiuh. Don'-chu turn over dat sody-water, white man! You know dey ain't no tukky roaster under dat sody-water. I 'cla' 'fo' Gawd, ef a white man wuz to eat a flapjack, an' it did n' give him de belly-ache, I 'cla' 'fo' Gawd he'd git out a search-wa'nt to see ef some nigger had n' stole dat flapjack goin' down his th'oat." "Mr. Bobbs has to do his work, Mother," put in Peter. "I don't suppose he enjoys it any more than we do." "Den let 'im git out'n dis business an' git in anudder," scolded the old woman. "Dis sho is a mighty po' business." The ponderous Mr. Bobbs finished with a practised thoroughness his inspection of the cabin, and then the inquisition proceeded down the street, around the crescent, and so out of sight and eventually out of hearing. Old Caroline snapped her chair back beside her greasy table and sat down abruptly to her spoiled ham again. "Dat make me mad," she grumbled. "Ever' time a white pusson fail to lay dey han' on somp'n, dey comes an' turns over ever'thing in my house." She paused a moment, closed her eyes in thought, and then mused aloud: "I wonder who is got Miss Arkwright's roaster." The commotion of the constable's passing died in his wake, and Niggertown resumed its careless existence. Dogs reappeared from under the cabins and stretched in the sunshine; black children came out of hiding and picked up their play; the frightened Ophelia came out of Nan's cabin across the street and went her way; a lanky negro youth in blue coat and pin-striped trousers appeared, coming down the squalid thoroughfare whistling the "Memphis Blues" with bird-like virtuosity. The lightness with which Niggertown accepted the moral side glance of a blanket search-warrant depressed Siner. Caroline called her son to dinner, as the twelve-o'clock meal is called in Hooker's Bend, and so ended his meditation. The Harvard man went back into the kitchen and sat down at a rickety table covered with a red- checked oil-cloth. On it were spread the spoiled ham, a dish of poke salad, a corn pone, and a pot of weak coffee. A quaint old bowl held some brown sugar. The fat old negress made a slight, habitual settling movement in her chair that marked the end of her cooking and the beginning of her meal. Then she bent her grizzled, woolly head and mumbled off one of those queer old-fashioned graces which consist of a swift string of syllables without pauses between either words or sentences.