Old Mr. Tomwit asked if his companions had ever heard how Newt Bodler, a
wit famous in Wayne County, once broke up a negro funeral with a
hornets' nest. The idlers nodded a smiling affirmative as they watched
the cortège go past. They had all heard it. But Mr. Tomwit would not be
denied. He sallied forth into humorous reminiscence. Another loafer
contributed an anecdote of how he had tied ropes to a dead negro so as
to make the corpse sit up in bed and frighten the mourners.

All their tales were of the vintage of the years immediately succeeding
the Civil War,--pioneer humor, such as convulsed the readers of Peck's
Bad Boy, Mr. Bowser, Sut Lovingood. The favorite dramatic properties of
such writers were the hornets' nest, the falling ladder, the banana
peel. They cultivated the humor of contusions, the wit of impact. This
style still holds the stage of Hooker's Bend.

In telling these tales the white villagers meant no special disrespect
to the negro funeral. It simply reminded them of humorous things; so
they told their jokes, like the naïve children of the soil that they
were.

At last the poor procession passed beyond the white church, around a
bend in the road, and so vanished. Presently the bell in Niggertown
ceased tolling.

* * * * *

Peter always remembered his mother's funeral in fragments of intolerable
pathos,--the lifting of old Parson Ranson's hands toward heaven, the
songs of the black folk, the murmur of the first shovelful of dirt as it