The woman gave her buttered bread and meat and these she hid under her coat until she was sitting again on the curb before the church when she ate them with all the reserve she could control. After that she walked down the street toward the centre of the town and there she found many people who looked like the people of her world. No one minded her or noticed her old dress or the coat now hanging on her arm. Many of the people must be richer than herself, she thought, for they had things to sell in baskets and things in buckets – eggs, butter, sorghum molasses. A few of them, she supposed, must be very rich, those riding high-stepping horses or driving in high traps. These went along the roadway with puckered brows, holding tight bits, and they seemed to be worried for fear they might drive over some of the other kind, but those with this worry were a very few. A man began to sell cattle in the square, crying in a loud jargon. The people walked about in the street, ignoring the pavements and the crossings; the order of the town fell down before the way of the country. Ellen stood by the fence that surrounded the courthouse, laying her finger along the wrought-iron spikes and looking at the mouldy walls where the red bricks sank away into shadows. The white stone wall of the jail showed at one side, and in this wall there were little long windows with one iron bar dividing them up and down. A man was standing under one of the windows talking to a voice that came through the iron bar. The courthouse bell rang almost merrily, and lawyers with papers came out of stairways. A man carrying a banner was ringing a bell, and the sheep were crying. ‘Vote for John Moran for Sheriff’ were the words on the banner, but later there came another banner saying, ‘Burley Growers Join the Pool’. Act fitted into act and turned upon a word; the whole was a drama already well rehearsed; a man leaned out from an upper window just as a cow bawled sharply, and a little boy ran across the square just as an old negro man led a mule away from the watering tub. A man stood in the door of the courthouse and chanted in a loud voice a chant which came to Ellen thus:

O yes! O yes!

The Honourable Judge

…

Is now sitting

…

Come all ye…

And you shall be heard!

By mid-morning vehicles could scarcely pass through the throng in the street. Ellen asked her question often. An old man dropped a bag of apples and one rolled down at her feet. She took it up and handed it to him gravely, eager to take part in the play.

‘It rolled outen the poke,’ she said.

‘You can keep it, sis.’

‘Do you know of any campers out any the roads?’