The old negro looked up, and Ragan saw that there were tears on his black and wrinkled cheeks. But the darky grinned cheerfully at sight of the policeman. “Jes’ thinkin’ on de old times, Miste’ Ragan. Thinkin’ on de old times, suh,” said Eph. Ragan was half inclined to laugh, and half inclined to cry. He felt so sorry for the old man that he ordered him gruffly to get up and go home and go to bed. And Eph got up, and bowed, and brushed the paving with his cap, so deep was his obeisance. “Yas, suh, Miste’ Ragan,” he promised. “Yas, suh, I’m goin’ right along....” And he tucked the banjo under his arm, and crossed the street, and started up Beacon Hill. Ragan knew where he dwelt, down in the swarming hive beneath the Hill. He watched old Eph go, watched the shuffling, splay feet, and the bent shoulders, and the twisted, crooked little body.... “The darned old nut,” said Ragan gruffly, to himself. “Not sense enough to go to bed....” And he went on down the street, whistling between his teeth and trying not to think of Eph’s bowed body and the tears upon the black old cheeks. II Eph’s songs, in the old days, were simple darky ballads, or lullabys, or the songs of the southland that all the world knows. People sometimes brought their children, of an evening, just to hear Eph sing: “Don’ You Cry, Ma Honey ...” or that fearsome lullaby about the “Conju’ cats....” When the old man was in good voice, he never failed to gather a little audience about him. His listeners used to call out and ask him to sing certain songs that were their favorites; and sometimes Eph sang what they wished to hear, and sometimes he refused. He would never sing “Dixie.” “I ain’ no slave nigger,” he was accustomed to protest, with scorn. “I fit ag’in’ de South, in de big war. Rackon I’m gwine sing dat song? Lawdy, man, no suh.” They told him, laughingly, that the war was over. “Da’s all right,” he agreed. “De war’s over. Mebbe so. But I ain’ over. Not me. An’ long as I is what I is, I don’ sing no rebelliums. No suh.” Those who had enough curiosity to make inquiries found that Eph told the truth when he said he had fought for the North. He had served in that colored regiment whose black ranks are immortalized in the Shaw Memorial, opposite the State House, just up the hill from where Eph had his nightly stand; and he carried his discharge papers in a tattered old wallet in his tattered coat.... By the same token, though he would never sing “Dixie,” it required no more than a word to start him off on that mighty battle hymn, “Mine eyes have seen the glory....” When he sang this, his voice rolled and throbbed and thrummed with a roar like the roar of drums, and there was the beat of marching feet in the cadence of his song. His banjo tinkled shrilly as the piping of the fifes, and his bent shoulders straightened, and his head flung high, and his old eyes snapped and shone....