Moll Peters was a friendly person, always kind to a child. She worked in a house where boarders were kept and where there were two other servants, a dark thin girl and a man named Berry. Other negroes would come to the kitchen, two or three men often, for Moll would slip them a bite of something to eat, a fresh hot pie or a cookie or a piece of bread dripping with rich hot gravy. They would laugh loud over their stories and carry forward their jokes from day to day. Or having been reticent because of the presence of a child, speaking in half-syllables and signs, they would suddenly flash quick fearful stories they knew. Moll was trying to win over the young man, Berry, from the dark girl. He would eat her hot sops and pies and kiss her fat jaws, but in the end he would go when the dark girl called him, and the dark girl was not afraid. She would look at Berry with hard gathering eyes or hold out toward him briefly one dark thin hand whose palm was pale yellow-white, and she would treat Moll with friendly indifference, bragging on her pies and her sauces. Berry would sing a song, throwing into the words an infinity of soft gliding modulations and quickly-breathed grace-notes, looking meltingly at Moll as he sang. His song, I cannot stand to see my baby lose, I love her from her head down to her shoes, would burst through the great laughter when he came down from the dining-room with a tray. The kitchen knew that Horace Bell was the father of Miss Tennie’s unborn infant. This fact was well known to the pans in the scullery closet under the sink, to the pans and skillets that were put away into the secret and ill-odored dark but would come clattering out in the hurry of their wanting. “Ol’ big-mouthed devil!” Moll said once with a great laugh, after a great roll of laughter and a whispered comment. “Him and Miss Tennie! God knows!” Known, these, to the pans and pots and skillets, to the spoons and dippers and colanders, but not to the sauces and syrups and gravies and roasts that went up to the boarders’ dining-room. A gravy could roll discreetly out from a skillet and leave all knowledge behind to flavor the rich scrapings which Moll spooned upon a bit of bread for her own mouth or for the mouth of some chosen friend. Miss Nannie Poll and Mr. Trout flavored one of Moll’s sops, a sauce which was sweet with the grease of knowledge. A white man was the father of Letty’s youngone, and old Mr. Preacher Benton was, God knew, a feisty old cuss, after Mag. She, Moll, had nursed old Mrs. Putty in her deliriums and listened to her talk all night, and the men that woman had had in her time would fill a prayer-meeting, God knew, if half she said in her ravings was true. Old Jonas Beatty smelled like a billygoat, and Miss Jodie Whippleton tried to hide her dead brat in the calf lot but the hogs got in and rooted it up for her.