We are the Chosen People who must go before, like a Voice in the Wilderness, to puppare the way. Hallelujah, praise the Lord. What we’ll do to them en’emies, respeckted Madam, is a plenty. These yere foreign nations is wusser than what you write about them. The way they ack, respeckted Madam, is somethin’ scand’lous. Specially the French. White wimmen makin’ over a sanctified cullud boy like who but he! But don’ you fret, respeckted Madam, for fear I mought fergit my raisin’. Pussonally I wouldn’t so demeen myself as to ’sociate with no white wimmen what would demeen theirselves by ’sociatin’ with cullud. It was reassuring to feel that a representative from our old town was keeping so stern an eye upon the morals and manners of our volatile ally. We learned not long afterward that Sam’l had been invalided safely home, suffering from something like shell-shock. As Aunt Lady put it in her letter, he must have heard a gunshot somewhere. We forgot about Sam’l for a while after that, until one very early morning I heard our furnace being shaken down with a sort of rhythmic emphasis, and asked the maid who brought in my coffee what all the racket was about. She tossed her head. “Hit’s de new houseman,” she reported, “and he ’lows don’t nobody but him know how to shake a furnace nohow.” She giggled angrily. Intuition told me what had occurred, even before a voice came floating up the furnace pipes: “Hark, fum de tomb come do’fum soun’ (Jay-bird jump an’ jar de groun’).” Nobody but Mahaly’s child could have given this song its old, peculiar eeriness. Sam’l had abandoned the coloratura type of vocalization and returned to an earlier manner. “Yes, M’dame, hit’s me,” he called up cheerily (since his sojourn in France he no longer pronounced me “Moddom”). “Miss Lady done sent me along to work for you-all a while,” and he presently handed me his credentials. Since his return from the war, Aunt Lady wrote, the other Negroes had treated him so unsympathetically that she thought best for him to convalesce elsewhere, in the care of people like ourselves who could understand his sensitive nature. While Sam’l, she went on to say, was not and could never be a decent house servant, he was certainly better than the city sort, who, she understood, were likely as not to sit down beside you in the street car. He did not drink or gamble, he was not light-fingered (though of course he sometimes borrowed things, like anybody), and he was willing and anxious to do whatever was expected of him, whether he knew how or not. His shell-shock merely took the form of a sort of nervousness in the feet, resembling St. Vitus’s dance. We did not, as it happened, either need or want a houseman, particularly one afflicted with St. Vitus’s dance; but Aunt Lady, having never in her life failed a friend, is naturally not a person whom her friends can fail. Sam’l and I engaged each other.