Then came the carriages, and suddenly the narrow street hummed and bloomed like a tropic garden. Six to a carriage sat the sisters. The effect produced by the colors was strangely like that wrought in the music; scarlet, purple, orange, flamingo, emerald; wild, clashing, unbelievable discords; yet, in their steady flow before the eye, possessing a strange, dominant rhythm that reconciled them to each other and made them unalterably right. The senses reached blindly out for a reason. There was none. They intoxicated, they maddened, and finally they passed, seeming to pull every ray of color from the dun buildings, leaving the sunlight sane, flat, dead. For its one brief moment out of the year the pageant had lasted. Out of its fetters of civilization this people had risen, suddenly, amazingly. Exotic as the Congo, and still able to abandon themselves utterly to the wild joy of fantastic play, they had taken the reticent, old Anglo-Saxon town and stamped their mood swiftly and indelibly into its heart. Then they passed, leaving behind them a wistful envy among those who had watched them go,--those whom the ages had rendered old and wise. § When the exodus from the Row was completed, Bess helped Porgy out to the boat and established him in an angle of the main-deck cabin, where he could see and enjoy the excursion to the full. Below them on the wharf, Maria, who had the direction of the refreshment committee in hand, moved about among the baskets and boxes, looking rather like a water-front conflagration, in a voluminous costume of scarlet and orange. Bess left Porgy and descended the ladder. “I gots a ready hand wid bundle,” she announced diffidently. The immense negress paused, and looked her up and down. “Well, well, it looks like yer tryin’ ter be decent,” she commented. Instantly the woman chilled, “Yuh kin go tuh Hell!” she said deliberately. “I ain’t axin’ fuh no sermon. I want a job. Does yuh want a han’ wid dem package, or not?” For a moment their eyes met. Then they laughed suddenly, loudly together, with complete understanding. “All right, den,” the older woman said. “Ef yuh is dat independent, yuh kin tek dem basket on board.” After that they worked together, until the procession arrived, without the interchange of further remarks. § Down the quiet bay, like a great, frenzied beetle, the stern-wheeler kicked its way. On the main deck the band played without cessation. In a ring before it, a number of negroes danced, for the most part shuffling singly. The sun hurled the full power of an August noon upon the oil-smooth water, and the polished surface cast it upward with added force under the awnings. The decks sagged with color, and repeated explosions of laughter rode the heat waves back to the drowsing, lovely old city long after the boat had turned the first bend in the narrow river and passed from view on its way to the negro picnic grounds on Kittiwar Island.