Caroline called her son to dinner, as the twelve-o'clock meal is called
in Hooker's Bend, and so ended his meditation. The Harvard man went back
into the kitchen and sat down at a rickety table covered with a red-
checked oil-cloth. On it were spread the spoiled ham, a dish of poke
salad, a corn pone, and a pot of weak coffee. A quaint old bowl held
some brown sugar. The fat old negress made a slight, habitual settling
movement in her chair that marked the end of her cooking and the
beginning of her meal. Then she bent her grizzled, woolly head and
mumbled off one of those queer old-fashioned graces which consist of a
swift string of syllables without pauses between either words or
sentences.

Peter sat watching his mother with a musing gaze. The kitchen was
illuminated by a single small square window set high up from the floor.
Now the disposition of its single ray of light over the dishes and the
bowed head of the massive negress gave Peter one of those sharp, tender
apprehensions of formal harmony that lie back of the genre in art. It
stirred his emotion in an odd fashion. When old Caroline raised her
head, she found her son staring with impersonal eyes not at herself, but
at the whole room, including her. The old woman was perplexed and a
little apprehensive.

"Why, son!" she ejaculated, "didn' you bow yo' haid while yo' mammy ast
de grace?"

Peter was a little confused at his remissness. Then he leaned a little
forward to explain the sudden glamour which for a moment had
transfigured the interior of their kitchen. But even as he started to
speak, he realized that what he meant to say would only confuse his
mother; therefore he cast about mentally for some other explanation of