And Eph, who knew white folks and their ways as well as the slave niggers he scorned, understood that this was the Sergeant’s way of telling him there was no hope at all. So he said simply: “Thank’e, sir.” And he turned, and with a sad and dreary dignity he went out, and down the stairs to the street, and up the Hill and down to the little room where he lodged. He was alone in his room all that day. The woman who kept the boarding house, a billowy negress with a pock-marked face, heard little moaning cries and lamentations coming from behind his closed door; and once she knocked and offered her comfort, but Eph drove her away with hard words, and nursed his sorrow alone. That night, some of those who saw him at his stand by the subway kiosk thought he looked tired; but he was as gay as ever, and as cheerful. He made one innovation in his singing. Across the street and above his head rose the spire of the Park street church. Whenever the hands of the clock in this spire touched the hour, old Eph rose, and took off his hat, and lifted up his voice and sang: “‘Oh say, kin you see....’” He sang this each hour that evening, and each hour in all the evenings that were to come, until the end. And at first they scoffed a little, because they thought he was playing patriotism for his own ends; but when they saw how earnestly he sang, and felt the wistful tenderness in his tones, they faintly understood, and more respected him. When Ragan came on duty, shortly after midnight that night, he thought old Eph looked sick, and he sent the old man home. III It was Ragan, in the end, who brought Jim Forrest to see Eph. Forrest was a reporter on one of the daily papers. He was unlike the reporter of fiction, in that he was neither a “cub” nor a “star.” He was just plain reporter, with a nose for news, and human sympathy, and some ability as a writer. He was a young fellow twenty-two or three years old. His father died just as he finished college, and Jim of necessity gave up law school and buckled down to earn a living for his mother and himself. The newspaper business seldom pays enormous salaries; but there is no other profession in which a green man can earn so much. Jim began on a salary of fifteen dollars a week, and at the end of his first year was raised to twenty. At the same time they put him on the night shift at police headquarters. When Jim was earning fifteen dollars a week, he and his mother lived, and that was about all. For they had been accustomed to five or six thousand a year before Mr. Forrest died; and a dollar still looked small and unimportant to them. By the time Jim was raised to twenty, Mrs. Forrest had learned to make one dollar do the work of two; and they managed.... Jim worked hard, and wondered when he could ask for another raise.