“Dat sound just de sort ob lil shack for me.”
III
The strange sadness of evening, the détresse of the Evening Sky! Cry, cry, white Rain Birds out of the West, cry ...!
“An’ so, Miami, you no come back no more?”
“No, no come back.”
Flaunting her boredom by the edge of the sea one close of day, she had chanced to fall in with Bamboo, who, stretched at length upon the beach, was engaged in mending a broken net.
“An’ I dats way glad,” she half-resentfully pouted, jealous a little of his toil.
But, presuming deafness, the young man laboured on, since, to support an aged mother, and to attain one’s desires, perforce necessitates work; and his fondest wish, by dint of saving, was to wear on his wedding-day a pink starched, cotton shirt—a starched, pink cotton shirt, stiff as a boat’s-sail when the North winds caught it! But a pink shirt would mean trousers ... and trousers would lead to shoes.... “Extravagant nigger, don’t you dare!” he would exclaim, in dizzy panic, from time to time, aloud.