night, tuh go right tuh Lody cabin, an' tell she tuh mek a conjer tuh cas' de debbil out Bess."
"Yuh t'ink dat cure she?" asked Porgy, with a glimmer of new hope in his eyes.
"I ain't t'ink. I knows," came in tones of absolute conviction. "Now, min'; an' do wut I say."
The big negress shuffled away to her room, leaving Porgy alone in the gloom.
The bent, solitary figure raised its eyes to the square of sky, with its bewildering profusion of stars, that fitted like a lid over the high rim of the court. There were no sounds except a weary land breeze that fingered the lichens on the south wall, and a whisper from the bay, as the tide lifted its row of shells and pebbles a notch further up the littered beach.
Now that all human companionship had been withdrawn, the watcher felt strangely alone, and smaller than the farthest star or most diminutive shell. Like a caged squirrel, his tired mind spun the rounds of his three alternatives: First, the white man's science, gaunt, clean, and mysterious, with the complete and awful magistracy which it assumed over the luckless bodies that fell into its possession. He knew that it returned some healed in body. He knew that
