There followed the humble, happy life of the quarters: picking a banjo, crooning as he patted and swung, flashing his teeth at a girl; rocking a child in his arms, tenderly, lovingly; bending up and down over a wash-tub, testing a flatiron with wetted forefinger; “washin’ dem dishes an’ settin’ ’em erroun’.” (We heard him humming his mother’s old working song to the timeless steady thump of the orchestra, and Aunt Lady smiled at me dimly.) * * * * * Now and again the music changed, and for a moment some familiar tune emerged. To the beat of “Greased my heel wid hog-eye lard,” we saw him slip stealthily along the hen-roosts, seize his prey and still it with a quick twist of the wrist; later he seemed to be shooting craps, down on his knees, shaking the dice and rolling them out, to delighted cries from the audience: “He fives! He sevens! Attaboy, King! Roll your own! Babies, come to Papa!” We rode a race with him, jockeying home to a grand-stand finish. (I thought of poor, astonished Miss Susy.) We saw him off to the war, strutting gloriously, twirling his baton at the head of a brass band, and we saw him slipping ingloriously home again, peering back over his shoulder as if he had seen a ghost; for Sam’l did not spare himself. Next he mounted the pulpit, wrestled with the Lord in prayer, laying off his hands in eloquent gesture, giving us the Word straight from the shoulder, so that a sudden hysterical voice out of the gallery shouted, “Yas, O my Lawdy! _I_ hears You callin’ me!” And all the time his feet kept up that steady, monotonous, hypnotic beat and shuffle, shuffle and beat, as if they could never stop; as if they could never stop until the unseen force that manages the puppet show should cease to pull the strings. When at the end he stumbled away out of the spotlight, dancing still, bent over double like an old rheumatic that leans upon a stick, there was a moment’s quiet. Some two thousand people felt for that moment, perhaps, just what he intended them to feel: the loneliness of children in a world that has grown old, the helplessness of a simple jungle folk, a bandar-log, set down in the life of cities and expected to be men. “They ack so mean an’ ornery an’ outrageous ’cause they got such woolly heads!” Then the audience followed him, as it had welcomed him, with shouts and shrieks of laughter. But Sam’l’s white folks would never laugh at him again; dreamer of dreams that he was, seer of visions. Aunt Lady’s dear, wrinkled face was frankly wet with tears. Her husband put an arm around her. “Why, old honey, it’s only Sam’l at his monkey motions! What are you weeping about?” “_I_ don’t know. What are you!” she countered snappishly. FOUR DREAMS OF GRAM PERKINS BY RUTH SAWYER From _American Mercury_