villagers in Hooker's Bend. He thought of them in a curious way.
Although he was now a B.A. of Harvard University, and although he knew
that not a soul in the little river village, unless it was old Captain
Renfrew, could construe a line of Greek and that scarcely two had ever
traveled farther north than Cincinnati, still, as Peter recalled their
names and foibles, he involuntarily felt that he was telling over a roll
of the mighty. The white villagers came marching through his mind as
beings austere, and the very cranks and quirks of their characters
somehow held that austerity. There were the Brownell sisters, two old
maids, Molly and Patti, who lived in a big brick house on the hill.
Peter remembered that Miss Molly Brownell always doled out to his
mother, at Monday's washday dinner, exactly one biscuit less than the
old negress wanted to eat, and she always paid her in old clothes. Peter
remembered, a dozen times in his life, his mother coming home and
wondering in an impersonal way how it was that Miss Molly Brownell could
skimp every meal she ate at the big house by exactly one biscuit. It was
Miss Brownell's thin-lipped boast that she understood negroes. She had
told Peter so several times when, as a lad, he went up to the big house
on errands. Peter Siner considered this remembrance without the faintest
feeling of humor, and mentally removed Miss Molly Brownell from his list
of possible subscribers. Yet, he recalled, the whole Brownell estate had
been reared on negro labor.

Then there was Henry Hooker, cashier of the village bank. Peter knew
that the banker subscribed liberally to foreign missions; indeed, at the
cashier's behest, the white church of Hooker's Bend kept a paid
missionary on the upper Congo. But the banker had sold some village lots
to the negroes, and in two instances, where a streak of commercial
phosphate had been discovered on the properties, the lots had reverted
to the Hooker estate. There had been in the deed something concerning a