This manoeuvre was inexplicable--a stranger would have puzzled to make it out. The shade was as plentiful upon one side of Clay Street as upon the other; each sagged wooden sidewalk was in as bad repair as its brother over the way. The small, shabby frame house, buried in honeysuckles and balsam vines, which stood close up to the pavement line on the opposite side of Clay Street, facing Judge Priest's roomy, rambling old home, had no flag of pestilence at its door or its window. And surely to this lone pedestrian every added step must have been an added labour. A stranger would never have understood it; but Judge Priest understood it--he had seen that same thing repeated countless times in the years that stretched behind him. Always it had distressed him inwardly, but on this particular morning it distressed him more than ever. The toiling grim figure in black had seemed so feeble and so tottery and old. Well, Judge Priest was not exactly what you would call young. With an effort he heaved himself up out of the depths of his hickory chair and stood at the edge of his porch, polishing a pink dome of forehead as though trying to make up his mind to something. Jefferson Poindexter, resplendent in starchy white jacket and white apron, came to the door. “Breakfus' served, suh!” he said, giving to an announcement touching on food that glamour of grandeur of which his race alone enjoys the splendid secret. “Hey?” asked the judge absently. “Breakfus'--hit's on the table waitin', suh,” stated Jeff. “Mizz Polks sent over her house-boy with a dish of fresh razberries fur yore breakfus'; and she say to tell you, with her and Mistah Polkses' compliments, they is fresh picked out of her garden--specially fur you.” The lady and gentleman to whom Jeff had reference were named Polk, but in speaking of white persons for whom he had a high regard Jeff always, wherever possible within the limitations of our speech, tacked on that final _s._ It was in the nature of a delicate verbal compliment, implying that the person referred to was worthy of enlargement and pluralisation. Alone in the cool, high-ceiled, white-walled dining room, Judge Priest ate his breakfast mechanically. The raspberries were pink beads of sweetness; the young fried chicken a poem in delicate and flaky browns; the spoon bread could not have been any better if it had tried; and the beaten biscuits were as light as snowflakes and as ready to melt on the tongue; as symmetrical too as poker-chips, and like poker-chips, subject to a sudden disappearance from in front of one; but Judge Priest spoke hardly a word all through the meal. Jeff, going out to the kitchen for the last course, said to Aunt Dilsey: “Ole boss-man seem lak he's got somethin' on his mind worryin' him this mawnin'.”