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At that moment Peter heard a cry in his ears and felt arms thrown about his neck. He looked down and saw his mother, Caroline Siner, looking up into his face and weeping with the general emotion of the negroes and this joy of her own. Caroline had changed since Peter last saw her. Her eyes were a little more wrinkled, her kinky hair was thinner and very gray.

Something warm and melting moved in Peter Siner's breast. He caressed his mother and murmured incoherently, as had Tump Pack. Presently the master of the launch came by, and touched the old negress, not ungently, with the end of a spike-pole.

“You'll have to move, Aunt Ca'line,” he said. “We're goin' to get the freight off now.”

The black woman paused in her weeping. “Yes, Mass' Bob,” she said, and she and Peter moved off of the launch onto the wharf-boat.

The Knights and Ladies of Tabor were already up the river bank with their hero. Peter and his mother were left alone. Now they walked around the guards of the wharf-boat to the bank, holding each other's arms closely. As they went, Peter kept looking down at his old black mother, with a growing tenderness. She was so worn and heavy! He recognized the very dress she wore, an old black silk which she had “washed out” for Miss Patti Brownell ​when he was a boy. It had been then, it was now, her best dress. During the years the old negress had registered her increasing bulk by letting out seams and putting in panels. Some of the panels did not agree with the original fabric either in color or in texture and now the seams were stretching again and threatening a rip. Peter's own immaculate clothes reproached him, and he wondered for the hundredth, or for the thousandth time how his mother had obtained certain remittances which she had forwarded him during his college years.