Old Judge Priest by Irvin S. Cobb

* Publisher's Note -- Under a different title this story was printed originally in another volume of Mr. Cobb's. It is included here in order to complete the chronicles of Judge Priest and his people as begun in the book called "Back Home" and continued in this book.

THERE was a sound, heard in the early hours of a Sunday morning, that used to bother strangers until they got used to it. It started usually along about half past five or six o'clock and it kept up interminably -- so it seemed to them -- a monotonous, jarring thump-thump, thump-thump that was like the far-off beating of African tomtoms; but at breakfast, when the beaten biscuits came upon the table, throwing off a steamy hot halo of their own goodness, the aliens knew what it was that had roused them, and, unless they were dyspeptics by nature, felt amply recompensed for those lost hours of beauty sleep.