He was faithful as bread or salt, A flawless servant without a fault, Major-domo of Wingate Hall, Proud of his white folks, proud of it all. They might scold him, they might let him scold them, And he might know things that he never told them, But there was a bond, and the bond would hold, On either side until both were cold.

So he didn’t judge, though he knew, he knew, How the yellow babies down by the Slough, Had a fourth of their blood from old Judge Brooke, And where Sue Crowl got her Wingate look, And the whole, mad business of Shepley’s Wager, And why Miss Harriet married the Major. And he could trace with unerring ease A hundred devious pedigrees Of man and horse, from the Squire’s Rapscallion Back to the stock of the Arab stallion, And the Bristol line through its baffling dozens Of doubly-removed half-second-cousins, And found a creed and a whole theology On the accidents of human geology.