Now, the great negro population, at first so encouraged, was crowded into a festering multitude of dilapidated buildings that stood on the flats close by the region where the river coiled through level acres of low-lying country.  This place was known as the “Bottoms.”

I am trying to give you the flavour of the town.

They had prohibition there, too ... long before it won nation-wide power ... consequently the negroes drove a vast trade in bootlegging ... and a concomitant prostitution of coloured women and girls throve.  One or two students on the hill had, to my knowledge, negro mistresses of whom they were fond....

The drug stores did a thriving business in the sale of spiritus frumenti—­for “snake bite” and “stomach trouble,” which seemed to be prevalent and epidemic throughout the community.

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Saturday was market day for the farmers who lived in the adjoining countryside ... and the livery stables where they put up their horses were also resorts for gambling and the selling of “bootleg” booze....

These farmers were a wild lot ... something like European peasants in their smacking of the soil and the country to which they belonged, but with a verve and dash of their own distinctly American.

There were three or four cheap restaurants that catered solely to their trade ... “a square meal for a quarter” ... and a square meal they served ... multitudes of fried stuff ... beefsteak, potatoes, boiled ham, cabbage, heaps of white bread constantly replenished as it was voraciously devoured ... always plenty of hot, steaming coffee.  Where these restaurants profited I could never see ... unless by a little bootlegging on the side.

It was to one of them that I repaired when I left my malodorous job.  The same one where I had spent my first night in town.

* * * * *

Langworth sent for me one day.

“I have heard wild tales about you, Johnnie.  I don’t usually listen to gossip, but these tales are so recurrent and persistent ... about your going about with the degraded people who live in the Bottoms, that I considered I ought to see you about it.”

I confessed that, though I did not drink their bootleg booze, I did have a wide acquaintanceship with the folk of the Bottoms, and that I knew all the rowdies among the farmers ... that I passed a lot of time about the livery stables talking with them.  That I often rode out to their farms in the hills and spent Saturdays and Sundays there.  I avowed that there people were more interesting to me than the carefully tailored professors and students.

My schoolmates had met me on the streets in company with these wild-looking yokels, sometimes taking them to their waggons when they were too drunk to pilot themselves effectively.  And they had applied to me the proverb of “birds of a feather.”

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