Siner nodded.

"I thought all that out before I came back here, Cissie. A friend of
mine named Farquhar offered me a place with him up in Chicago,--a string
of garages. You'd like Farquhar, Cissie. He's a materialist with an
absolutely inexorable brain. He mechanizes the universe. I told him I
couldn't take his offer. 'It's like this,' I argued: 'if every negro
with a little ability leaves the South, our people down there will never
progress.' It's really that way, Cissie, it takes a certain mental
atmosphere to develop a people as a whole. A few individuals here and
there may have the strength to spring up by themselves, but the run of
the people--no. I believe one of the greatest curses of the colored race
in the South is the continual draining of its best individuals North.
Farquhar argued--" just then Peter saw that Cissie was not attending his
discourse. She was walking at his side in a respectful silence. He
stopped talking, and presently she smiled and said:

"You haven't noticed my new brooch, Peter." She lifted her hand to her
bosom, and twisted the face of the trinket toward him. "You oughtn't to
have made me show it to you after you recommended it yourself." She made
a little _moue_ of disappointment.

It was a pretty bit of old gold that complimented the creamy skin. Peter
began admiring it at once, and, negro fashion, rather overstepped the
limits white beaux set to their praise, as he leaned close to her.

At the moment the two were passing one of the oddest houses in
Niggertown. It was a two-story cabin built in the shape of a steamboat.
A little cupola represented a pilot-house, and two iron chimneys served