ham, a bowl of scrambled eggs, a pot of coffee, some preserved raspberries, and a tiny glass of whisky.
The plate which Captain Renfrew had set before his guest was a delicate dawn pink ringed with a wreath of holly. It was old Worcester porcelain of about the decade of 1760. The coffee-pot was really an old Whieldon teapot in broad cauliflower design. Age and careless heating had given the surface a fine reticulation. His cup and saucer, on the contrary, were thick pieces of ware such as the cabin-boys toss about on steamboats. The whole ceramic mélange told of the fortuities of English colonial and early American life, of the migration of families westward. No doubt, once upon a time, that dawn-pink Worcester had married into a Whieldon cauliflower family. A queer sort of genealogy might be traced among Southern families through their mixtures of tableware.
As Peter mused over these implications of long ancestral lines, it reminded him that he had none. Over his own past, over the lineage of nearly every negro in the South, hung a curtain. Even the names of the colored folk meant nothing, and gave no hint of their kin and clan. At the end of the war between the States, Peter's people had selected names for themselves, casually, as children pick up a pretty stone. They meant nothing. It occurred to Peter for the first time, as he sat looking at the chinaware, that he knew nothing about himself; whether his kinsmen were valiant or recreant he did not know. Even his own father he
