One was tall and black and kind-eyed, with the unquenchable kindness of the colored race.

His official name was Solomon Ezekiel Pickup, but ever since Mrs.Fortescue, as Betty Beverley, had taken him, a little waif, forlorn and homeless and friendless, he had been simply Kettle, being as black as a kettle.

He had watched and adored the baby days of "Marse Beverley," the straight young stripling now training to be a soldier at West Point, and Anita, the violet-eyed daughter, the adored of her father's heart, but Kettle had not come into his own until the two-year-old baby, John Hope Fortescue II, had arrived in a world which did not expect him, but welcomed him the more rapturously on that account.

The new baby had taken everybody by surprise, and immediately acquired the name of the After-Clap.

He coolly approved of his father and mother, and thought Anita an entertaining person when she got down on the floor to play with him.